China’s Global Times government propaganda newspaper predicted the demise of professional election polling in America in a column published Wednesday, noting the woefully inaccurate status of most polls before Tuesday’s presidential race.
While China’s Foreign Ministry officially refused to comment on the election between President Donald Trump and rival Joe Biden on Tuesday, its state media arms eagerly published opinion pieces condemning American democracy for being more “chaotic” than Chinese totalitarianism. The Global Times, in particular, has previously made the claim that elections “cannot truly reflect the essence of democracy” and that American values are widely unpopular around the world.
On Monday, the Global Times published a piece suggesting that the American political system would collapse shortly after the election.
“Elites usually dominate the polls in the U.S. As a matter of fact, some polling organizations have already realized that they did not make proper distinctions between well and poorly educated respondents,” author Li Haidong, a Chinese professor, wrote in a Global Times column on Tuesday. “It illustrates that when elites plan and design the polls, they can hardly grasp the true feelings of grass roots [sic].”
Li condemned mainstream polling firms for being detached from the realities on the ground in swing states and generally modeling polls in ways that do not help illuminate how Americans will vote. He added that pollsters were biased in a way that also blinded them to support for Trump.
“A number of questions in some public opinion polls are filled with strong political bias. Certain U.S. media outlets have also become tools of U.S. political infighting. As a result, the outcome of the polls can hardly remain objective,” Li wrote. “Polling organizations will certainly exist for a long time. But they are in need of drastic reforms with their methods and content to keep up with the times. If the polls cannot reflect reality, they will eventually die out. ”
Post-election analysis in 2016 did find that modeling did not account for differences in education levels among voters, or potential turnout among voters without college degrees, who skewed heavily for Trump. Pollsters vowed that they would account for this socioeconomic difference in 2020, but once again misrepresented support for Biden, particularly in key battleground states. The polls also seemed to miss critical shifts in support for Trump among nearly every demographic except white non-Hispanic men.
“Biden appeared to have slim but consistent leads heading into Election Day, and many of those dissipated. Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Texas were all polling very close for months, and wound up not close at all,” NPR noted on Wednesday, suggesting polling in 2020 may have been even more incorrect than 2016. “And, unlike 2016, this year even the national polls appear to have been far off.”
Li went on to condemn Americans in general for supporting Trump, claiming that the president “does not believe in science at all” for his refusal to impose draconian lockdowns on citizens the way China did. At the height of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic in its home city, Wuhan, Chinese Communist Party officials welded families shut in their homes, causing deaths through negligence. In other parts of the country, the Party denied ethnic minorities food by locking them in their homes.
“A large swath of people firmly believe in a presidential candidate who does not believe in science at all. It mirrors the anti-intellectualism is becoming a trend, even a culture in the U.S.,” Li concluded. “Those populist forces and trends will pose an increasing influence in U.S. domestic politics and diplomacy. This is not a positive sign for the U.S., and the world.”
Li lamented that “countless celebrities and scientists” were not enough to secure a comfortable victory for Biden.
Elsewhere in the pages of the Global Times, Chinese “experts” again predicted the swift destruction of the American state.
“No matter who wins the election, the U.S. will lose some of its most precious things,” an analysis piece declared on Wednesday.
“The U.S. has to some extent degraded. This is the conclusion. In recent years, the U.S. has ignored rules of the international community. Everything has been oriented toward maximizing American interests,” the Global Times claimed. “Egoism has flooded both internally and externally. The U.S. domestic political arena also has a tendency to take sides. Lies dominate, the original bottom line of value has been breached, and the end justifies the means. These assumptions have become real problems ‘all of a sudden.'”
The government newspaper concluded that “political fanaticism” had cost America its status as “one of the most stable Western countries.” It also bizarrely claimed that 230,000 people died of Chinese coronavirus in America “as a consequence of this U.S. presidential election, and more will die.”
At press time, the electoral college system has not resulted in the declaration of a winner in the 2020 presidential election. Critical states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona have yet to conclude their vote-counting, complicated by millions of ballots sent through the mail.
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