General Discussion

How does posting a likely rigged poll in a liberal paper showing the GOP winning (It was actually a 4% margin of error, the amount it had the GOP winning by.) encourage Dems to vote?????

Polls showing one party or the other leading encourage the winning party to vote.

"Polls influence voter perceptions,” Lawrence said. “And we know that how candidates are doing in the polls can then influence the type of coverage they get."

The media flock to the front-runners. And the more coverage those candidates get, the higher they tend to climb in the polls — a dynamic that can turn into a self-perpetuating cycle."

https://journalism.uoregon.edu/news/six-ways-media-influences-elections

Which is the cycle the NYT was trying to create or at least join in.

And we know more coverage of a candidate or party leads to more votes for that candidate. No coverage leads to No votes.

Trump had a ton of coverage for free and that's one of the reasons he won in 2016.

In fact showing false polls of an unpopular candidate winning is a common tool used by governments to influence voting in foreign countries and their own country. Russia and the US use it as a staple in their espionage and manipulation of elections.