Congressional Republicans Mike Johnson and John Thune are suddenly sounding like Trump on polling — and ordinary Americans should ask why it took this long.
The top two Republicans in Congress are now publicly echoing President Trump's attacks on midterm polling as "fake," according to the Washington Examiner, just as nationwide surveys show the GOP heading for a poor performance next week. Thune and Johnson have every reason to be skeptical: the Wedgewood Polls outfit, which was carried by multiple top aggregators including the New York Times, was caught fabricating survey data to shape the midterm narrative, including in Michigan's Senate race.
That's not a theory. That's a confessed fraud that was fed into the same polling averages the establishment press uses to tell Americans what to think.
But here is the question neither outlet asks: where was this skepticism from GOP leadership when manufactured numbers were used to sideline populist candidates in prior cycles? When the same aggregators ran flawed or tilted surveys that depressed turnout and donor support for insurgent Republicans, Johnson and Thune had nothing to say. The uniparty adopts populist rhetoric when it needs cover, not because it believes it.
The Guardian frames Trump's broader election-integrity efforts as an "assault on the legitimacy of the midterm elections," but buries the actual enforcement actions. The Justice Department has asked Washington state to set aside ballots from more than 400 people it says are registered without U.S. citizenship — the third such state challenge this month while voting is already underway. A federal appeals court rejected the administration's move to block California from counting ballots of 20,000 registered voters DOJ claims are non-citizens. Trump also announced a $1 million reward for reports of voter fraud, contingent on arrest and conviction.
The Guardian calls Trump's fraud claims "unfounded" while simultaneously reporting that DOJ is litigating over thousands of non-citizen registrations in two states. You can't have it both ways — either the federal government has a basis to challenge those registrations or it doesn't, and the courts are sorting it out.
The real story for Americans: a polling firm was caught fabricating data that influenced public perception of a Senate race, and GOP leaders only found their voice when their own prospects looked grim. Meanwhile, the same press that amplified the fake polls is now dismissing legitimate federal challenges to non-citizen voter registrations as an attack on democracy itself.
Watch what Johnson and Thune do, not what they say. If poll skepticism doesn't produce real oversight of the polling industry and the aggregators that launder bad data, this is just survival rhetoric from politicians who need populist cover they haven't earned.
