Polls And Narratives

 The follow-on revelations about Wedgewood polling add context to what we already know, but are not likely to be the end of what we will know. Wedgewood produced fake polls as a "social experiment" to see the impact of these fake polls on narratives. OK, so that's...bad. There is at least some evidence that this might have tilted close races, including the Michigan Senate race. Elliott Morris, who has been doggedly pursuing this story, suggests that the prime mover behind these polls was a Republican operative, but it might also be some degenerate Kalshi gamblers trying to sway "prediction markets."

The two big examples is that perhaps they tilted the Michigan race to Abdul El-Sayed and they certainly tried to tilt the Wisconsin race to Hong. Hopefully AES wins, because I think the Senate would be a better place with his perspective, but he could very well be an electoral underperformer in a Blue year. Hong thankfully lost, as she looked doomed in the general election. 

Ratfucking has always been a Republican prerogative, going back to Nixon. In Trumpistan, the reverence for the democratic will of the people is irrelevant, so ratfucking seems the least of things to worry about. Still, with Trump hitting historically low popularity numbers, the question is beginning to emerge about whether it will be a Blue Wave or Blue Tsunami. The numbers are reaching 2008 levels of anger at the GOP.

Ratfucking is all they have.

Getting a reform agenda through both Houses of Congress and past Trump's veto pen will be nearly impossible, but Democrats do need to be thinking seriously about reforms. A few places they should be looking:

- Ending partisan gerrymandering. This - and many other areas - are where legislation intersects with Court reform. Simply outlawing partisan and racial gerrymandering might not survive this Court's arbitrary constitutional interpretations, but they have to try.
- Campaign finance reform. This, too, will likely run afoul of the Court absent reform. At the very least, transparency laws need to exist.
- Prediction Markets. We have a gathering gambling scourge across multiple cultural avenues, but they need to ban gambling on political outcomes, even if they can't ban gambling on sports.
- Establish criminal penalties for fraud. This would include AI deep fakes, but also the Wedgewood nonsense. Electoral democracy cannot survive in a landscape where the very idea of objective truth is absent.

It's a lot and they won't get a lifted finger of help from the GOP. All they have is fraud and ratfucking.