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Great read. Also some of the source links the writer uses are good reads as well if you like a deeper dive. A few paragraphs I clipped in below but reading the whole thing is eye-opening.
It only struck me last week how badly the polling informational space has been intentionally and systematically poisoned by bad actors who want to depress Democratic turnout, create a reality in which it’s OK to vote for the end of representative democracy, and convince Trump’s hardcore following that he cannot lose this election; it can only be stolen from him. I have consumed unknown hundreds of poll results – both standalone and aggregate – that mean to distort my view of the Harris-Trump matchup, which, as I’ve argued with Patrick Daugherty, might not be all that close if you don’t get bogged down in the reams of data pouring into your addled brain.
This is hardly new. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, we saw Senate races that had not been all that close suddenly tighten in the final week before Election Day. John Fetterman, a former Bad Faith Times favorite, suddenly and without explanation found himself one point down in aggregated polling after leading by 4-6 points over the election’s final month. So what happened?
A flood of last-minute right-wing polls happened. These polls, considered neutral and trustworthy by the Polling Industrial Complex, painted Fetterman as a slight underdog with no significant change in the contours of his race against a surgically-altered fake TV doctor. These unreliable polls goosed the election betting markets in Dr. Oz's favor and made Fetterman's campaign look like something of a lost cause, the same way Elon Musk's appearance alongside Trump at a Pennsylvania rally (Elon recently discovered the "state of Pennsylvania") has designed to boost Trump in the betting market. The effort was successful, and may have been part of an elaborate "pump and dump scheme" to alter discourse around the general election.