CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is skeptical of polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris in the lead, citing past underestimations of former President Donald Trump’s support in 2016 and 2020. Harris has recently seen a surge in polling, maintaining an edge in the RealClearPolitics average. However, during his appearance on “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” on Thursday, Cooper expressed growing concerns about the Harris campaign’s prospects, suggesting that past polling inaccuracies make him wary of current predictions.
“One of the big stories out there right now is the polling bump for Harris following the debate. Now, I don’t know whether to trust polls. We were supposed to trust them in 2016 and they were wrong. In 2020, they were pretty wrong,” the host said.
“Trump has traditionally underperformed in these polls. I mean, I report on them, I think they are interesting to talk about, and look at, particularly when you dive deep on certain topics,” Cooper responded. “We have some great people that look at polls. But in truth, deep down inside, I don’t think I buy them. Like, I just don’t. It’s like — I’m sure some are accurate. I’m not casting aspersions.”
Billionaire founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who has been supportive of Trump, voiced his concerns this week that Democrats would find a way to “cheat” the former president out of a victory over Harris if the race was “close.” He also criticized the nature of modern U.S. elections and compared the way they are conducted unfavorably to the way elections are held in democratic Europe.
“If it is going to be close, by the way, if it is a razor-thin close election, I’m pretty sure Kamala will win because they will cheat,” he told the “All In” podcast. “They will cheat. They will fortify it. They will steal the ballots. In the event that it is close, I don’t want to be involved. In the event that it is not close, I don’t need to be involved. So that it is a straightforward analysis right there.”
A host asked: “How much cheating to you think happens every year?” Thiel responded: “You need to be careful with the verb. Cheating, stealing — implies something happens in the dark of night. I think the verb you’re allowed to use is ‘fortify.’ Like ballot harvesting, all these rule changes were sort of done in plain daylight. I think our elections are not perfectly clean, otherwise, we could examine it and have a vigorous debate about it.”
Asked what he would change about how U.S. elections are conducted, Thiel said: “I don’t know. At a minimum, you’d try to run elections the same way you do it in every other Western democracy. You have one-day voting. You have practically no absentee ballots. It’s one day where everything happens. It’s not this two-month elongated process. That is the way they do it in every other country. You’d have a somewhat stronger voter ID and make sure that the people who are voting have a right to vote. That’s basically what they do in every other Western democracy, and it used to be more like that in the U.S. It has meaningfully decayed over the last 20-30 years. 30-40 years ago, you got the results on the day of the vote. That sort of stopped happening.”
