Pollster fakes polls to expose zero scrutiny; GOP leaders prove it, call the real ones fake too.

…(cont) Let me back up, because the file on this is thicker than one word, and I don't want to leave anything out. On September 2nd, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he "worries about losing" the Senate majority he runs, and called himself, in his own word, "a realist." Eight days after that, at his own party's midterm convention, the crowd booed him off the stage — I've got that one circled, don't ask me why I circle things, it's a habit from the job. On October 15th, Speaker Mike Johnson said it's hard to get Republicans to respond to "our own" pollsters. His words, our own, like there's a company line and a separate truth running underneath it. On October 19th, that same newspaper ran a piece asking whether losing ought to have consequences for Johnson. So going into last week, the record already had a Speaker blaming his own side's numbers and a Majority Leader telling reporters, on the record, that he might lose.

Now here's the part that sent me back to the newsstand. By the next day the Examiner had its own headline up about an industry that keeps falling for fake polls. Fair enough. That's one use of the word, and it comes with a confession attached.

On the 27th — the same week, the same paper — Johnson and Thune are reported to have both adopted the president's line that the polling showing Republicans behind is "fake," the same week Johnson's office put out a wire of endorsement statements for a leadership job he already holds.

I've worn the same raincoat through more elections than I can count on one hand, and the lining's never needed a label to tell me it keeps the water out. A poll works or it doesn't. So when I had both Examiners on the counter, the 21st and the 27th, same typeface, same word, I had to wonder: is there a difference between a poll a company admits, in writing, to inventing, and a poll two party leaders call fake without admitting anything at all? And if there's exactly one outfit in this whole stack whose business is confirmed, on the record, to be making numbers up, and it isn't the one Johnson and Thune are pointing at — which one are they pointing at?

Oh — before I let you go, one more thing, and then I'll get out of your hair. The other story — the one with Johnson and Thune and the word "fake" — has no correction running against it yet, far as the stack in front of me shows. So if a paper prints two stories with the same word in the same week, and only one of them has somebody owning up to making the numbers up, which one would you check first?