Are Powers-that-be Poll Dancing Again to Sway Midterms?
Could the Republicans say, paraphrasing Mark Twain, that rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated? Recent history of polling missteps and abuses — and a new story illustrating this problem — suggests that maybe they can.
As many know, the Democrats have been counting on a “blue wave” to wash away their Washington power woes. But not only are polls now tightening, they’re also frightening — in their inaccuracy. A case in point is a “polling organization” that just confessed it was issuing fake numbers that helped hard-core leftists. The entity claims it was conducting an “experiment” to illustrate polling’s perils. Critics, however, call this a cop-out designed to explain away the organization’s fraud.
And whether or not at issue is damage control, damage had already been done. The fake polls could, arguably, have helped candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed win his Michigan Democratic primary.
Fox News reported on the story Wednesday, writing :
Democrats are up in arms after a so-called polling firm that projected far-left candidates as strong contenders in several primaries admitted that it had fabricated its polling data.
Wedgewood Polling, which billed itself as an election survey company, released a statement Tuesday night admitting it used “fabricated numbers” for an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.”
The group’s polls were cited by Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign amid a high-profile primary race against Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. The nonpartisan polling aggregator Political Polls also cited Wedgewood in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, showing socialist Francesca Hong having an edge over Republican candidate Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis.
More striking still, some polling showed Hong leading other Democratic primary candidates by nearly 30 points in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race. The outcome?
She narrowly lost the primary to opponent David Crowley.
Some had defended the deceptive polling, pointing out that primary races are notoriously volatile and difficult to predict. But a 30-point error is hard to explain away. At the time, many of us wondered if the establishment trumped Hong , a radical-left outsider, via vote fraud. Now it appears that perhaps it was Hong, a mentally unstable woman , the books were being cooked for.
Vetted As Well as Asylum Seekers
For Wedgewood’s part, it places the onus on media that uncritically cited its “work.” The organization states, the Washington Examiner related yesterday:
“Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.”
“Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms — including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS Now.” The organization claims it conducted one real poll in Nebraska.
Of course, its well known that media organizations will run with data that advances their agenda. It’s also often easy to hoodwink “experts” because they, well, aren’t always so expert. (See the story about the mother who fooled art galleries into thinking her toddler’s daubs were great, display-worthy works.)
Regardless, Wedgewood’s “experiments” were hardly victimless. While the deceptive numbers didn’t flip Wisconsin’s result (only almost?), the Michigan Democratic primary might’ve been a different matter. Per the Examiner again:
Former Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow promptly said her campaign was a victim of bogus polling. “As one of the candidates featured in these polls — the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) — here’s the impact of this ‘experiment,’” the Democratic Michigan state senator wrote on X.
McMorrow went on to say that her donations dried up, her “devastated” volunteers panicked, and the media bombarded her with calls to drop out of the race, which she did on July 5.
Wedgewood Polls [sic] numbers were also used to demonstrate that progressive Abdul el Sayed polled the best against the then-likely Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, while McMorrow performed the worst. This was crucial because many Democrats were making an electability argument against el Sayed at the time.
As it was, El-Sayed eked out a one-percent primary victory — despite polls showing him well ahead.
Nothing New
As indicated earlier, though, the poll dancing isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Back in 2016, late Democratic consultant Pat Caddell accused Reuters of rigging polls to turn a Donald Trump lead over Hillary Clinton into the reverse. “I suppose you can get away with it in polling because there are no laws,” an incredulous Caddell remarked . “But, if this was accounting, they would put them in jail.”
In fact, research into more than 3,000 senatorial polls going back years found that they regularly overstated Democratic candidates’ numbers.
Yet it isn’t just incompetent or dishonest pollsters that skew results; voters themselves do, too. Just consider the Wednesday testimonial of commentator Peter Merkl:
Pollsters keep asking me about the midterms. I keep telling my iPhone to “Report Spam and Delete,” but they keep calling. Why would I ever answer them?
Why would I come out as MAGA if, despite being protected by federal laws banning such harassment, conservative Supreme Court Justices — with their own police and the U.S. Marshals protecting them! — were tormented in their homes for months. Famous right-leaning speakers are routinely confronted by organized disruptions and physical intimidation. Conservative celebrities are always cancelled. Charlie Kirk.
If that’s what happens to powerful conservatives, why would I, a certified nobody, stick my neck out for a pollster? Why would any Deplorable? As my mother used to say, “Always give crazy a wide berth.”
Paranoia? It’s hard making that case given that some Democrats have actually said they want to kill their political opponents .
The result of this woke pressure is clear, too. The more un-woke a candidate/policy is, the less likely it is that respondents will reveal their support for him/it.
Another factor is that conservatives are more skeptical of, or even antagonistic to, the establishment than liberals are. And I’ve heard some say they will actually lie to pollsters to “mess with them.”
The upshot? Adding three points to every Republican’s number in the RealClearPolitics polling average may bring you closer to reality. The bottom line, though, is that no one should be fooled by poll dancing. It’s more entertainment than education.
