The Trump Regime Is Suddenly Very Worried About Fake Midterm Polls
FCC Chair Brendan Carr is fretting about "news distortions"
Your fourth favorite Bad Faith Times blogger (me) was wrong about the 2024 election, that there was no sensible case to make for the wannabe tyrant who had been dispatched by an uninspiring moderate Democrat four years earlier.
I was wrong about Democrats mercifully doing away with Leslie Knope politics. I was wrong about the handshake. I was wrong about the vibes being on the side of decency and democracy. A few months after that I was wrong about even more shit. Maybe it's best if I don't blog about predictions, but rather a range of outcomes, a phrase you use when you're a little disoriented and have no idea what anyone is thinking about anything because the faith is bad and getting worse.
One thing I was not wrong about in 2024 was the American right's deployment of make-believe polls meant to infect polling aggregators – the insufficiently careful ones, anyway – and influence mainstream media outlets' coverage of upcoming elections. Throw one or two of these totally made-up polls into a bucket of polls conducted in legitimately scientific ways and a race goes from an easy Democratic victory to a photo finish sort of contest.
As long as a polling firm looks legit, aggregators – most of them – are all too happy to mix their nonsense data into the pot of actual polling data.
Denny Carter
Here's how Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo explained it:
There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.
Trump regime officials are not unaware of this twisted little polling game meant to tell Republican voters that some races are not lost causes and urging them to drag themselves to the voting booth to stop the wicked Democrats from taking charge, negative polarization being the engine of modern American politics. So when FCC Chair Brendan Carr, a career right-wing hatchet man who very much enjoys weaponizing basic federal government functions against people he hates, says the regime threatens broadcasters who give air time to "fake polls," he knows exactly what he's doing.
Carr, as always, in operating in bad faith here. It's a double helping of bad faith though: One part pretending to care about the accuracy and legitimacy of election coverage while working for a president intent on fucking with the midterms in one way or another, and one part implying that polls on your TV screen showing Democrats winning by stunning margins and competing in unthinkably red parts of the country are, in fact, quite fake, and meant to deceive you, the American consumer of news.
The first part of this bad-faith concern for integrity in election coverage offers cover fro Carr and the regime as right-wing polling outfits fill the polling environment with truckloads of shit data in the final weeks of the midterm elections. It gives the regime a (truly unbelievable) veneer of neutrality in how elections in the US are covered by the biggest, most visible media outlets. It gives them a chance to say – in hindsight – that they were always the fair-minded arbiters of how elections should be responsibly covered. With the presumption of good faith offered by a corporate media apparatus unequipped to properly cover authoritarian regimes, this sort of playacting is important if an anti-democracy party is going to be treated like any other in a democratic republic.
The second part of Carr's post – the purpose – is to dismiss polls showing solid Democratic leads in Republican-dominated districts and states as a first step to invalidating the results. Maybe a poll shows James Talarico up five points in Texas headed into Election Day and, when every vote is counted, he wins by two points over Elon Musk's weird-looking sock puppet. Well, regime officials might say, we have to look further into this and see why, exactly, the polling was off. And we might have no choice but to throw out the results if we find evidence of "news distortions" or "broadcast hoaxes," things of that nature.
Whether the courts will go along with such shoddy lawfare is doubtful. But there will be an effort to stop certification of crucial races that threaten Republicans' Senate majority. Planting seedlings of doubt in the minds of media consumers is only a step in that process.
Denny Carter
Carr's post on Elon Musk's fascist wonderland known as the X platform came the same week as some of the polling industry's most responsible folks, including G. Elliott Morris, uncovered a fake polling firm that appears to have juiced Polymarket odds in favor of Democrats this fall, presumably to make money off the new odds fueled by make-believe election data points. The president himself posted about the fake poll controversy. No one would be surprised if this was a coordinated effort to plant fake polls and go after media outlets that aren't sufficiently loyal to our sleepy mob boss president.
Republicans and their media allies had nothing to say about "fake polls" in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, even as mysterious polling firms released frequent data showing an overwhelming upcoming Republican victory. That fizzled, of course, because it was never real in the first place. The fake polls worked: You would have thought, watching CNN in the weeks before the 2022 elections, that Democrats were about to lose every single race in the country (because eggs were really expensive thanks to corporate collusion). There was no red wave. Most polling aggregators made no adjustment as to how they create their fancy graphs and charts. So it goes.
Just know, as you see and read coverage of Carr and other regime higher-ups making a big fucking deal about the legitimacy of polling, that their concern is – as always – in bad faith. BFT readers knew that though.
I will say today what I've said for more than a year: Unless the regime and their state-level allies are willing to do what monarchist and JD Vance buddy Curtis Yarvin says they must do to eliminate American self governance, they will lose both chambers of Congress and face years of reaping, which will be somewhat less fun than the sowing.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
