November 12, 2026
Sentiment Is Driven, Not Polled
By: Brian Parsons
For most of my adult life, Alabama football was the gold standard of collegiate sports. Being a University of Georgia alumnus, it pained me to watch my Georgia Bulldogs take a backseat to my redneck cousins to the West. After the era of the San Francisco 49ers and the West Coast offense, Alabama football wasn’t sexy. It was no-holds-barred, punch-you-in-the-mouth football. While West Coast football teams emphasized torching you for gobs of points, Alabama was content beating you into submission for four quarters. A demoralization campaign. I am only so fortunate that Coach Kirby Smart, another Georgia Alumnus, sat at the right hand of Nick Saban to acquire and develop the culture of brutality he has brought to Georgia.
At a time when college football is rapidly changing and, in my opinion, turning into something less than savory, pollsters rely on the eye test to seat teams in the playoff picture. Historically, teams moved up and down the polls based largely on the win/loss column, and this has at times led to lesser teams landing in the playoff hunt. Now that we’re up to 12 teams and soon to be 24 teams in the college football playoff picture, the demand for perfection has lessened. Quality wins can be as important as quality losses, and are less about scoring as quickly and often as possible. Discipline, physicality, and consistency are rewarded in the rankings, not just polls based on wins and losses. Sentiment is driven and not polled.
If we are to believe last week’s midterm election results, Democrats found an extra 20 million votes in their shellacking of Republicans, and their explanation follows this logic. This week, CNN’s Van Jones let the cat out of the bag that a super secret campaign to drive sentiment around “affordability” was unleashed on the public which turned out the extra 20 million voters. After 2020, my bullshit meter tends to go off anytime someone mentions a super secret plan to win national elections. This harkens to the 2021 TIME magazine article on the super secret plan to save democracy, which was really just cover for all of the shenanigans to stuff the ballot box in the name of the COVID pandemic. I suspect there is a bit of that going on as well, but the important part of this admission isn’t really the plausibility of turning out an extra 20 million voters; it’s the believable sentiment that everyone is unhappy and everything is historically terrible. Sentiment is driven and not polled. How does this relate to our statewide and local election results in Idaho?
My wife and I invested significant time and effort into fighting Idaho’s Proposition 1, the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act. Our initial concerns were largely driven by a desire to address the public’s concerns with Idaho’s Defense of Life Act, but after a thorough review of Idaho’s maternity landscape, a different picture began to emerge. Not only does Idaho rank in the top ten nationally for maternity care, but its numbers actually improved under the DOLA legal framework. A 3-year average of pregnancy-related deaths before and after Dobbs showed a 60% drop in maternal mortality in Idaho. Critics would be mistaken to dismiss this as all of Idaho’s maternity care going outside of Idaho, because Idaho’s result mirrors the national landscape. According to the CDC, in March of 2026, the United States reached its lowest maternal mortality ratio on record since the new surveillance system began in 2018, and even under the old system going back to 2007. It appears that Dobbs putting maternity care under a microscope has created the best outcomes. Everyone does their best work when the boss is watching.
The opposition campaign on Prop 1 became a race to inform the public before they could be misinformed. If you listened to your television, the sky has been falling, and women are dropping dead in the streets from the pregnancy pandemic. These claims were simply unsupported by the facts, and the opposition could be confident in voting their conscience. As with all things, sentiment had to be driven, and not polled.
In Idaho, electoral success fell strictly down Proposition 1 lines. While Proposition 1 failed statewide by a 56:44 margin, those districts where Proposition 1 received a thumbs up also elected Democrats. In Idaho, vote tallies aren’t kept at the legislative district level, so I asked AI to count the votes by voter precinct and then tally them according to the legislative districts that comprise them. The result? A 100% correlation. If a legislative district supported Proposition 1, it elected Democrats to the legislature.
It would be easy to dismiss this as the vote following the Democratic vote, but Democrats flipped six Republican legislative seats. Here in Pocatello, they flipped 2 Republican seats by turning 22 precincts that went for Donald Trump in 2024 to Yes on Proposition 1. This reflects poorly on local Republicans for failing to adequately oppose Prop 1. How many people do you know who asked about the many ‘Yes on Proposition 1’ signs that were littered throughout Pocatello, and who asked where the opposition signs were? I heard it frequently. Republicans cannot fear taking moral stands in the future. Sentiment is driven and not polled.
