Confirmed: Media Manipulation of Elections No Longer a Myth

I knew The Des Moines Register was defrauding the entire country when it ran a poll no one could possibly believe. They went too far.

Writing a book is hard work. The American War on Election Corruption, my book set to release next March, is coming along nicely. With no opportunity available to click and edit a typo or - even worse - a research error, being correct has never been more important. I am currently speed reading through Mollie Hemingway’s book, Rigged, to cross-reference a few points and make sure I’m not leaving anything structurally important out of my book. Mine is a much more personal read than Rigged is, but her subtitle stands out - How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

Her fifth chapter is called “The Revenge of Fake News,” and it resonates with me because I’ve always believed the media’s drumbeat of misinformation is necessary to bolster compliance - like with the COVID-19 scam - and into elections, in which seeds were planted for the entire year that Joe Biden was winning in the polls by this much, and people are this mad, and even though the early votes are going to show Trump by a mile, it will be a “red mirage,” and you should believe the pro-Biden results when they come trickling in days later. Hemingway writes:

Not many days went by during the Trump administration without the major corporate media’s running information operations against the president.

It just so happens I’ve reached the portion of my draft in which I am entering the 2024 election and attempting to blend my research and findings with standard election analysis tools I’ve developed over the years. As the calendar turned to November, I was feeling really good about not only Pennsylvania and Michigan, but also Wisconsin. The latter is different from the other two states, which I considered the Industrial Midwest. The Upper Midwest, on the other hand, consists of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is tough to peg in elections for several reasons:

• Propensity for close races; five of the last seven presidential races have been decided inside a single point

• Atypical swing voter behavior

• Dominance of two major urban counties that can overwhelm a slightly lower rural turnout

• Cheating, which has been mastered with corrupt voter rolls and mail-in ballots, plus Wisconsin’s specialty - same-day voter registration

• Lack of party registration data

On November 2, three days before the election, I was polishing up some of my assessments and I heard through the grapevine, later confirmed by Richard Baris, that the “gold standard” pollster of Iowa, Ann Selzer, was getting ready to shake the forecasting world to its core by dropping a poll in The Des Moines Register showing Harris leading Trump. I thought to myself, “No way,” because she had been accurate in Trump’s two previous races within a point, showing her methodology detected the working-class shift in the state, particularly along the eastern edge and the Mississippi River where it used to be blue as far as the eye could see.

No one in the polling industry appreciated her games, and Emerson cut her off at the pass by front-loading a poll that afternoon showing Trump leading by more than 10 points. Then Selzer’s poll came: Harris +3. I wrote about the absurdity of her poll at great length the very next day:

Selzer managed to memory hole her own Trump +18 poll over Biden from months earlier, ignore all 99 counties shifting more Republican by registration, and warp her own recall sample (who did you vote for in 2020?) to get the Harris +3 result in attempt to convince you her candidacy swung the state 21 points from June, even though she nor Trump visited Iowa because it was never in play. Hemingway was right on the money when she wrote about the media’s influence over elections. They rig them without changing a single law or stuffing even one ballot.

What exactly were they up to?

The media were up to information operations, and they used Ann Selzer to do it. The above graphic is the hit to Polymarket’s presidential market immediately after Selzer dropped the Harris +3. Seasoned election observers and gamblers knew that if Trump was struggling to pull Iowa by a margin of at least 9 points, he was going to struggle to take Wisconsin. If he couldn’t be guaranteed of victory in Iowa at all, he was dead in the water in every battleground state. The Midwest wouldn’t even approach competitiveness. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin wouldn’t even be inside five points if Iowa were a close race, and Ohio would be flirting with returning to blue statehood. She’d have been better of saying Trump was going to win by 4 or 5 points, which would have had an equal impact and preserved her dignity.

Newt Gingrich emailed me immediately wanting my thoughts on the poll. I wrote him back with common sense and logic, explaining Trump would win Iowa in a landslide and that this was nothing more than a shaping operation to sell massive cheating in Wisconsin - which happened, by the way - when Eric Hovde was kept out of the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, my sources tell me the Paul Ryan machine convinced him to fold on his challenges for the promise of future support. You can watch the glorious exchange between Gingrich and Selzer here, in which he tells her how wrong she is to her face using my numbers:

Why Am I Rehashing the Selzer Poll a Year Later?

It’s not so I can dunk on her again, believe me. I left it all on the field when I read her poll and told everyone watching my predictions Trump would win the state by double digits - and he took it by more than 13 points. This is important because earlier this week, it was announced that Trump’s lawsuit against Selzer, alleging fraud and election interference, is moving ahead in state court.