Polling Firm That Showed Francesca Hong Winning by Double Digits Just Admitted It Was All a Joke

So a firm shows Francesca Hong up double digits, Crowley reads the tea leaves and drops out on July 9, and then election night he's back in and actually wins. That's not a polling miss. That's a polling firm handing the DSA wing a fake trophy weeks before anyone voted, and it worked well enough to push a sitting county executive out of the race. Somebody should be asking who paid for that poll and why.

We've heard the excuses before. Sample size, likely voter models, house effects, all the usual hedges pollsters reach for when the number is off by a point or two. Double digits isn't off by a point or two. Double digits is a fantasy number dressed up as data, released into a live primary at the exact moment it could scare a candidate off the ballot. Crowley dropping out "seeing no path forward" wasn't him misreading the electorate. He was reading a poll that, by the firm's own admission now, was a joke.

This is what happens when the press treats every poll as gospel instead of asking who commissioned it and why the sample looks the way it does. Nobody in the political media bothered to sanity-check a double-digit lead for a Democratic Socialist against an incumbent-adjacent Democrat before running with it as settled fact. Crowley had to come back from the dead in his own primary because a supposedly neutral number turned out to be manufactured noise.

Wisconsin voters figured out what pundits and pollsters apparently couldn't, or wouldn't. The only poll that counts is the one on election day, and it's about time the press started acting like it knows that.