A Hot Mess, by Design |
This election cycle is a hot mess for Democrats, and the mess isn't an accident. It's fake polling. It's false new positions. It's phony new promises, rolled out the moment the real numbers get ugly. Put the last few days side by side and you don't get a party having a bad week. You get a party that's forgotten how to tell the truth to its own voters.
Start with the polling.
A firm called Median Strategies spent this summer feeding the political bloodstream with fabricated surveys — a 12-point Karen Bass lead in the Los Angeles mayor's race, a 20-point Francesca Hong lead in Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary. Local news picked them up. Social media ran with them.
Then this week the company admitted the whole thing was fake.
It called itself "a short-term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."
Translation: they lied, on purpose, to see if anyone would notice before it mattered.
And plenty of people didn't.
Bass survived her real race by five points, not 12. Hong lost hers by a razor's edge after her fake 20-point cushion evaporated on contact with actual ballots.
That should bother everybody.
Then there's the scrubbing.
Michigan Senate nominee Abdul........