“The Media Research Center polled Democratic voters in 2020 swing states and found that 17 percent wanted to change their vote if they had known the contents and evidence of the New York Post story.”
— Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.), at the same hearing
House Republicans are convinced that the mainstream media’s reluctance to regurgitate the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop in the weeks before the 2020 election helped seal Donald Trump’s defeat. But it’s always difficult to prove something that did not happen.
Lately lawmakers have cited a poll that they say makes their case — that a stunning 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for him if they had known about the laptop. Twitter briefly blocked users from sharing the New York Post story — a decision officials later said was a mistake — and Comer and Fallon made these comments at a hearing in which they questioned former Twitter executives about their actions.
Politicians love to tout polls to make their case. But as we have documented time and again, some polls are structured to produce the desired result. This is especially the case with opt-in online polls, which can be different from random-sample polls that contact people in an effort to replicate the views of a broad population.
The poll in question was done by the Polling Company, a conservative pollster founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of the Media Research Center. MRC is a conservative organization that runs Newsbusters, a website that documents what it perceives as a liberal bias in the media. (The website regularly criticizes The Fact Checker.)
Over several days, we sent numerous queries to both MRC and the Polling Company seeking additional information on the poll’s methodology. We did not receive a response, so we will have to rely on a public document posted on the web.
This was an online survey, conducted Nov. 9-18, 2020, of 1,750 Biden voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The voters were randomly selected from opt-in participants, with an effort to ensure proportional and representative demographics, the poll says.
The strange thing about this poll is the questions. These were not neutral questions designed to elicit opinions. Instead, they were framed to test negative messages about the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket or positive messages about the Trump administration in an effort to see whether any of these statements would be effective in moving votes.
This type of polling is typically done before an election so a campaign can test the most compelling arguments for its ads and speeches. But it’s not very useful for estimating the real-world impact of campaign messages, since it’s impossible to deliver all voters a message in a vacuum and to isolate its impact from competing arguments.
Each of these questions was designed either to cast Trump in the best possible light — or Biden in the worst. For instance:
- “At the time you cast your vote for president, did you know that the president had negotiated three different peace agreements between Arab countries and Israel, something never done before, and for which he’s been nominated for three separate Nobel Peace Prizes?”
This question suggests Trump had achieved a rare honor by being nominated for a Nobel Prize. But that’s a misleading claim. There were 318 candidates for the 2020 prize. Some of history’s most notorious figures — including Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (in two different years) and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini — earned nominations. Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo received 14 nominations just in 1936. Trump was nominated in 2020 by a far-right Norwegian politician, one of hundreds of thousands of people eligible to make a nomination.
Even so, more Biden voters (47 percent) said they were aware of the Nobel Prize nominations than those who said they were not (44 percent). Maybe that’s because Trump bragged about it more than two dozen times on the campaign trail.
Oddly, despite the statements by Comer and Fallon, none of the questions specifically mention the Hunter Biden laptop or the New York Post articles about it. The closest approximation is this one:
- “At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?”
Notice how the question raises the prospect of an FBI investigation, a “corrupt financial arrangement” and “tens of millions of dollars” for Joe Biden and his family? To this day, none of those allegations, a staple of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, has been proven.
Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in 2017 tried to strike a deal with CEFC China Energy, an energy conglomerate — and according to Washington Post reporting, CEFC and its executives paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle. But The Post, in an extensive report, did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC.
The poll said 45 percent of Biden voters were unaware of this incorrect claim, compared to 40 percent who were aware.
Another negative question makes this claim:
- At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that Joe Biden chose as his running mate and successor Kamala Harris, rated the most left wing Senator in America, even more leftist [than] Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist?
This is also a line Trump used often on the campaign trail. But it’s based on a GovTrack analysis that ranked lawmakers based on the pattern of bills and resolutions they co-sponsored with lawmakers from the other party; it is not a ranking of her ideology on the issues. Once again, the framing is misleading.
Strikingly, when you go through the poll results, they show that even these aggressively framed questions would not have deterred the vast majority of Biden voters from casting their ballot for him. Only a tiny percentage of voters surveyed — 4 percent of those unaware of the claim about an FBI investigation — said they would have switched from Biden to Trump. The survey gets a higher number, 16 percent, for the FBI question by including the results of those who said they would have voted for a third-party candidate or not cast a ballot for president at all.
Given that 45 percent of Biden voters in the poll were unaware of the FBI-related allegations, we need to adjust the results to account for that. This means that less than 2 percent of all Biden voters would have switched to Trump, and just over 7 percent would have not voted for Biden in total. Even buying the assumptions that this poll is measuring a real impact, the lawmakers are overstating the shift among Biden supporters by a factor of two.
Overall, the poll claims that any of the questions would have resulted in 17 percent fewer Biden votes in those states than recorded, though it does not make clear how that percentage was calculated. (It’s possible they were counting any Biden voter who said they wouldn’t have voted for Biden based on any one of these messages.) That, in theory, would have given Trump enough of a margin to win in six of the seven states that gave Biden an electoral college victory, the poll said.
But all of the lines that were tested were staples of the Trump campaign’s messaging. MRC suggests that media bias prevented those messages from getting through to voters and changing their minds to vote for Trump or even not vote at all. As we noted, that’s a stretch, because it assumes the Biden campaign was not offering its own messages to woo voters that, in the end, were more compelling.
A spokesperson for Fallon did not respond to a request for comment. Jessica Collins, communications director for the Oversight Committee, said that Comer was referring to the question about Biden’s alleged involvement in his son’s business ventures.
This poll conveniently supports a line that Republicans are pushing — that a lack of media coverage related to the Hunter Biden laptop made a difference in the presidential election. But when you dig into the results, which are swayed by aggressively misleading questions, it shows that for all but a tiny percentage of Biden voters, the story would not have made a difference — even if framed as a still-unproven scandal.
In any case, the questions in the poll are similar to messages the Trump campaign used in the final weeks of the campaign — and it still fell short. These lawmakers can claim they are simply quoting polls results — but it says less than they suggest and in many ways undermines their case.
They earn Two Pinocchios.
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