MSNBC’s Joy Reid pushed another conspiracy theory of her own Monday night by suggesting that Republican polling firms were fixing results to favor their political party.
"The ReidOut" host attacked polls continuing to suggest that Republican candidates are surging ahead of the midterm elections. In addition to claiming that their results were wrong, she insisted that there were part of an "insidious" plan to affect the media narrative.
"If you get past those headlines and dig a little deeper, you would uncover an insidious and seemingly intentional campaign from Republican-backed polling firms to flood the zone and tip the balance of polling averages in favor of their candidates, to create a narrative that Republicans are surging and that a red wave is imminent and inevitable," Reid said.
Using reports from Democratic pollster Simon Rosenberg, Reid said that "more than half" of recent midterms polls are from "Republican firms or groups."
Rosenberg himself appeared on the show as guest in the following segment, agreeing that Republicans have "corrupted" polling data.
"What’s really unfortunate is that the places we rely on to help us tell us what’s going on in the election have been corrupted by a flood Republican polling in the last few weeks. Now, in six major battleground states, more than half the polls conducted in October have been conducted by Republican firms. That means basically we can’t trust the data on Real Clear Politics or FiveThirtyEight any longer. It’s essentially Republican propaganda," Rosenberg claimed.
He also attacked mainstream media sources who continued to use polling reports from these firms.
"Listen, these are junk polls. The Republicans, this is part of the information war. They’re trying to suppress Democratic term out, create more negative sentiment for Democrats and more positive sentiment for them. What I think is disappointing, many of the people who do the analysis on elections, should’ve caught this. This is an unprecedented massive campaign by the Republicans too gain the polling average. And it’s disappointing to me this wasn’t caught earlier by many of the people that do this that are on TV and do this for a living. But it has to be understood now that the polling averages have been corrupted. We now need to look in my view towards the early voting," Rosenberg said.
Reid has had a history of pushing bizarre and outright false conspiracy theories and misinformation on both her show and her Twitter account. In 2020, she claimed that FiveThirtyEight was named as such for the margin of voters when "the Republican SCOTUS reversed the 2000 election."
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"Here's the thing: the reason there's a thing called @FiveThirtyEight is because 538 was the margin in FL when the Republican SCOTUS reversed the 2000 election during a recount, making Dubya the president. That's the kind of margin where races can flip. That's not what's up now," Reid tweeted.
FiveThirtyEight stands for the total number of Electoral College votes.
