The Poll Truthers Are Back

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 06, 2023

 

NBC News polling analyst Steve Kornacki is a professional, not a partisan. Indeed, he observes the day-to-day political combat he analyzes from an Olympian remove and with commendable dispassion. But Kornacki was compelled to descend from those heights by a spate of accusations alleging that the pollsters had rigged the survey data in Donald Trump’s favor.

 

The Mueller, She Wrote podcast — a program geared toward the anti-Trump “Resistance” and that was unduly confident that Robert Mueller’s investigation into the former president’s ties to Russia would bear fruit — forced Kornacki’s hand. The podcast’s X (formerly Twitter) account alleged on Tuesday that the Wall Street Journal had entered into a corrupt deal to publish pollster Tony Fabrizio’s work despite his ties to the Trump campaign and only to popularize the fraudulent notion that Donald Trump is running competitively against President Joe Biden.

 

This exhibition of the kind of paranoia that makes for popular posts on social media would be of little note if more reputable left-leaning media outlets didn’t grant it legitimacy. The New Republic, too, heaped scorn on the Journal for failing to “provide information about one of the men behind the poll.” Although TNR admitted that the Journal had, in fact, acknowledged that Fabrizio “works for a super PAC supporting Trump’s candidacy,” what the Journal failed to emphasize to the subjective satisfaction of TNR scribes is that Fabrizio also worked for Trump’s campaign in 2016. He therefore disbursed funds to Trump associates who were later accused or convicted of criminal misdeeds. True enough, but what does any of this have to do with the data?

 

Kornacki performed a service by jumping off the referee’s chair and recentering the conversation back on the terms the podcast and TNR initially set:

NBC’s national political correspondent went on to explain the fairly common practice in which media outlets that sponsor polls like this one contract with both Republican and Democratic firms, as the Journal did with Fabrizio’s outfit and the partisan Democratic pollster GBAO. “It is the bipartisan product of two partisan firms that each have vested interests in their national party’s success,” Kornacki wrote. “The idea is that this produces a quality poll – basically one partisan pollster acts as a check on the other.” Right. That, and it insulates media outlets that employ an editorial voice from the accusation that their data have been massaged to suit their partisan interests.

 

That authoritative debunking should have been the end of this affair, but the “Resistance” podcast wouldn’t let it go:

This still won’t satisfy those who have convinced themselves the polls have to be cooked. The root of their objections is the utter incomprehensibility of the notion that a hypothetical rematch between Biden and Trump could be a closely run thing. But, at least at this moment, it is. Surveys of registered voters over the last two weeks have shown that both candidates draw roughly the same levels of support, inside a particular survey’s margin of error.

 

Kornacki can spend all day explaining that Jesse Watters doesn’t conduct Fox News polls, and Paul Gigot and Tony Fabrizio have not conspired to craft a false narrative, but his efforts will be for naught. His critics are not trying to debunk a false narrative. Rather, they are crafting one for themselves.