Sneaky troll polls boost the far left yet we keep falling for them

Fake polls aren’t always fake news.For the second time this year, a new pollster has been caught flat-out fabricating political survey data.In August, Median Strategies was exposed as bogus after claiming its published poll showed that socialist Francesca Hong had a 23-point lead in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin.She lost.Now we learn that Wedgewood Polls, another new polling company that emerged this election cycle, was a complete fraud.The company admits that just one of the 17 polls it published this year was real.Only after the poll-analysis site FiftyPlusOne investigated and caught the fraud did Wedgewood claim that it was really running a prank or a sting.It aimed, the “firm” said, to “test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?”Good for FiftyPlusOne — but until then, the site had included Wedgewood’s polls in its election data.So did The New York Times, Decision Desk HQ, Vote Hub, and the biggest name in the business, Nate Silver.Wedgwood polls were cited on MS NOW and touted by Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom when its survey showed him tied in his US Senate race against Republican Sen.

Cindy Hyde-Smith.The fake polls have shown good news for both Democratic and Republican candidates, and sometimes for establishment Democrats such as Karen Bass against progressive challengers.But overall they’ve favored Democrats, and have specifically boosted the electability of Democratic Socialists.Silver’s model became a bit more favorable to Republicans after he removed the fake polls from his calculations.Liberal columnist Bill Scher raised the alarm months ago about pollsters with sketchy histories helping Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.Now we’re hearing an I-told-you-so chorus from the camps of Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, the two Democrats who lost ...