When it comes to the presidential election, it’s all over but the crying.

While, as of this writing, we’re still waiting on results from Arizona, but they’re not going to have any ramifications on who the president will be come January. There are some House races that might have an impact on who holds the majority in that chamber, but that’s just about it as far as national ramifications go.

But the polls were…questionable.

RealClearPolitics, which doesn’t play with the numbers at all, simply averages the polls together, had Kamala Harris with a slight lead. FiveThirtyEight had her winning with a slightly larger lead, but it was still close. Yet Trump won the popular vote entirely, and by a couple of percentage points, meaning they missed it by a fairly significant margin.

That’s interesting, because nearly a week before the election, pollster Nate Silver called out his colleagues.

Polling guru Nate Silver lashed out at other survey junkies in his field for “cheating” in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election — accusing them of recycling some results to keep the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris close.

The FiveThirtyEight founder said irresponsible pollsters were “herding” their numbers, or using past results to affect current ones, to keep Vice President Harris and former President Trump within a point or two of each other each time.

“I kind of trust pollsters less,” Silver said on his podcast, name-checking Emerson College. “They all, every time a pollster [says] ‘Oh, every state is just plus-one, every single state’s a tie,’ no! You’re f–king herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating!” he fumed.

“Your numbers aren’t all going to come out at exactly one-point leads when you’re sampling 800 people over dozens of surveys,” Silver vented.

Now, it should be remembered that Silver got it wrong, too. He had Harris winning on Tuesday as well, but he makes a valid point on how every single poll had a razor-thin margin of victory for whoever they had winning.

Which doesn’t mean jack for the Second Amendment.

Or does it?

I think it might.

If pollsters are cooking the books to deliver a specific result on a presidential election, what else are they doing it for? Think about how so many polls show this overwhelming support for gun control. Supposedly, the American people want assault weapon bans and red flag laws and universal background checks, among other things. Poll after poll claims that to be true.

But what if that’s just what the pollsters want it to say?

That would also explain why gun control isn’t really a winning issue in most races. If the issue isn’t that popular among voters really and it’s an illusion created by pollsters?

I can’t say that’s definitively happening. Silver made a claim about polls and I don’t have the expertise to truly evaluate whether he’s right or not. However, if we take what he says at face value, it has to raise questions about polling data in general. If pollsters will put their fingers on the scale in one case, where will they draw the line?

I don’t know, but in a world where I have a growing distrust of the supposed authority figures we’re supposed to be able to trust–doctors, academics, etc–it’s not really hard to believe that this is just one more group to add to the list. I hadn’t actually trusted polling data for a while, but that was due to how they asked the questions.

Now I have to wonder if they didn’t stop there.