Once Is Happenstance. Twice Is Coincidence. The Third Time It’s Enemy Action.
Not one. Not two.
Now three (four? Five?) different polling outlets have been outed as pushing totally fake poll numbers, and the media chewed them up, swallowed them, and vomited them out onto our computer screens as if they were serving us filet mignon.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action. The fourth and fifth? It is an invasion.
We've all known that many polls exist to push a narrative, but most at least come from established polling firms with a record and known biases. That's why a poll is sometimes labeled as coming from a campaign or an interest group, so the emptor may caveat it, as it were.
Such polls should be taken with a grain of salt because everyone knows they're released to help shape a narrative. They aren't exactly FAKE, but the questions are often framed to create a conclusion, or a campaign only releases polls that show what they want.
But there is a new(?) trend of fake pollsters releasing fake polls, and they are being reported as real, even included in polling averages. Some have even made it to betting sites, where money exchanges hands based on made-up numbers.
News organizations' entire model is based on the obviously false premise that they, unlike people like me and my colleagues, are "journalists" who work mightily to print only what is true and verified. They fact-check. They dig deep. They do the hard work bloggers in pajamas don't.
Only...for the most part, they rewrite press releases, take what government officials hand them, put on an Orange Man Bad spin if they can get away with it, and trash Republicans for sport.
They no longer even bother to check. They put their fingers in the wind and call it a day.
I'm not going to treat this as a "news" story where you need to know all the facts, because, frankly, it is moving too quickly, and the real point is that the media once again failed us, posting "fake news" as if it were real and verified. Polling is so fundamentally broken that at some point we should give up on trusting even the "real" ones that AREN'T just making it up as they go along.
I've written about the problems with polling several times, and fake polls are just the tip of the iceberg. Pollsters don't have to falsify anything to get bad answers; polling requires random samples, and random samples don't exist anymore to the extent they once did. Back in the day, it was at least plausible that you could, but with the fragmentation of the electorate, the reluctance of some people to answer polls, the technological challenges of reaching people by phone, by text, and by internet, and a need to guess who will actually vote, the best that pollsters can do is "model" the electorate, "model" the people answering, and essentially make WAGs (Wild A$$ Guesses) about what the results should look like.
🚨 BOOM: The New York Times just had to pull 15 midterm polls after the "pollster" behind them ADMITTED almost all of it was FAKE.
The firm is called Wedgewood Polls. It pumped out made-up numbers from June to October, and the Times put them right on its official poll tracking pages.
The Times says it vetted them first.
Wedgewood's own words on how easy it was to fool the media: "Far too easy."
This is the same paper telling you which polls to trust.
Trump has been saying it from day one. Now they're proving it for him.
Pollsters, or at least good pollsters, make a good-faith effort to do so, and some are even decent at it, but if you haven't learned from the past few election cycles that the general trend isn't toward accurate polls, I don't know what to tell you.
Now, with fake polling injected into the news cycle, we have one more reason to be skeptical of polling averages, which now include fake data. I doubt it changes the outcome much, since pollsters have a nasty habit of juking their own numbers to "cluster" and not stand out too much as elections near. It doesn't pay to Ann Selzer yourself.
The real lesson here is about the media, though, and not the polls. The media bought the lie, without even checking. An independent outlet, FiftyPlusOne, did the checking.
RealClearPolitics, which the censors labeled during the Biden administration as pushing misinformation, didn't fall for the scams the "mainstream" news did, and they're right to crow about it.
Well, not everyone treated Wedgewood as legit. RealClearPolitics, the pioneer poll aggregator, never included these bogus polls – either in the RCP Poll Average or in the voluminous number of surveys cited daily on our polling pages.
“RCP has a very high standard for including polls in our averages, which this pollster did not begin to meet,” explained Kavon W. Nikrad, RCP’s director of polling. “They were a new pollster with no track record to evaluate. They also had a ‘placeholder-style’ Google Sites website, had no staff directory on that website, and no social media history to look back on to establish that they were an actual, legitimate polling firm.”
“Meeting these criteria does not mean automatic inclusion in RCP’s averages,” Nikrad added, “but they are a start.”
The organizations that did take the bait were reluctant to give credit to RealClearPolitics. This was especially true of the New York Times, which is no surprise given its dubious track record in that regard. To give credit where it’s due, however, although FiftyPlusOne was one of the polling sites duped by Wedgewood, it was that group’s suspicions that cracked the case.
“Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public,” Wedgewood insisted Tuesday after being outed. “It was designed as a wake-up call.”
Few seasoned political observers are buying that explanation, least of all FiftyPlusOne. “This is incredibly misleading,” tweeted Cooper Burton of FiftyPlusOne. His site, Burton added, “was planning to publish an investigation into Wedgewood's polls tomorrow morning, and reached out to them this morning for comment. This is just an attempt to save face after they realized we caught them.”
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