No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, pollsters and pundits are taking it on the chin Tuesday night.
Almost every major poll and news outlet predicted a victory for Hillary Clinton. And as the vote totals rolled in, there were more than a few people at the Colorado GOP watch party that were reveling in just how wrong the polls and experts were about the election.
“The pollsters, which are complicit with the media. … they have become agenda driven to some degree and I think there’s some corruption there that needs to be cleaned up,” said Derrick Wilburn, Colorado GOP state party vice-chairman. “The other thing (people got wrong) is the silent Trump voter is real. There were a lot of people who weren’t going to stick a Trump sign in their grass, weren’t going to put a Trump sticker on their car because they didn’t want to get their paint job keyed or a brick thrown through their window. But they went into the booth and voted for him.”
Wilburn said unlike Clinton supporters, who “wore their support on their sleeve,” Trump supporters didn’t talk about their opinions at the water cooler. But they represented a silent majority that helped push Trump past the media’s expectations.
And Colorado could have been one of those states that bucked expectations and went red but, Wilburn said, the lack of major financial support for GOP Senate candidate Darryl Glenn hamstrung Trump in the state.
“A more robust funding of Darryl Glenn’s campaign for Senate would have made a big difference. He had some super PACS come riding in late that helped with some ad buys but he was battling uphill,” Wilburn said. “That didn’t help Trump. And we have a state that has been Californicated and is turning very blue. The Democrats caucused for Bernie Sanders and he’s about as left as you’re going to find.”
Photo by Nicolas Raymond, via Flickr, Creative Commons
