“The Wedgewood findings had no bearing on The Times’s own polling operation, which works in partnership with the Siena Research Institute,” the Times insisted in its report on the scandal. Yet we have no idea the extent to which that polling group or any of them place their metaphorical thumbs on the scales. The fake polls we now know about were spread on social media and have warped the perceptions of the races they involved. For example, after a Wedgewood poll in June showed the support for Mallory McMorrowin collapsing, the Michigan state senator running in the state’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate saw donations became a trickle and her campaign collapse. In Mississippi, the campaign for Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for the Senate there, pointed to Wedgewood’s fake numbers in a news release that declared that his campaign had “massive momentum.”
This is election interference by the Axis of Unethical Conduct. Several pundits have made the same point: the mission of the rigged polls, which somehow always seem to favor Democrats (See: “The Dishonest Waiter”), works like this:
Phase 1: Polls put Democrat ahead during most of the run-up in an attempt to demoralize Republican voters.
Phase 2: They tighten to a very narrow Democratic lead just before the election.
Phase 3 A: Organized Democrat voter fraud steals the election, with the rigged polls providing cover, or
Phase 3 B: The Republican victory is attacked as suspicious and illegitimate because it defied the polls, resulting in accusations that the Trump administration stole the election.
The latter, of course, is the justification for protests, demonstrations, riots…who knows what else. France?
No one should be surprised at this, surely no one who comes to Ethics Alarms with any regularity. I’ve been pointing to the polling scam for at least a decade. Back in 2017 I wrote this post, which concluded among other things, “Polls cannot be trusted to tell us anything useful or substantive. The pollsters can manipulate the findings, and do.” Cutting to the chase, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro wrote on Twitter-X:
“A pollster faked all his data and just got caught months later. So, here’s the lesson: people don’t know how to read polls, poll aggregators are garbage-in-garbage-out, and every major Senate race right now is a statistical dead heat. So go vote.”
Bingo.
