This election cycle is a hot mess for Democrats, and the mess isn't an accident. It's fake polling. It's false new positions. It's phony new promises, rolled out the moment the real numbers get ugly. Put the last few days side by side and you don't get a party having a bad week. You get a party that's forgotten how to tell the truth to its own voters.
Start with the polling.
A firm called Median Strategies spent this summer feeding the political bloodstream with fabricated surveys — a 12-point Karen Bass lead in the Los Angeles mayor's race, a 20-point Francesca Hong lead in Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary. Local news picked them up. Social media ran with them.
Then this week the company admitted the whole thing was fake.
It called itself "a short-term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification."
Translation: they lied, on purpose, to see if anyone would notice before it mattered.
And plenty of people didn't.
Bass survived her real race by five points, not 12. Hong lost hers by a razor's edge after her fake 20-point cushion evaporated on contact with actual ballots.
That should bother everybody.
Then there's the scrubbing.
Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed got caught by CNN erasing old posts declaring that "fireworks suck" and linking football — pickup trucks' close cousin in the American iconography he now claims to love — to slavery. Add to that his well-documented "anti-Mackinac Island fever," as Hugh Hewitt put it — swapping out disdain for one of Michigan's most beloved landmarks for a sudden, convenient love of the state's traditions the moment a general election against Mike Rogers made those old positions inconvenient.
Gone.
Deleted.
Memory-holed.
He's hardly alone in wanting to run away from yesterday's rhetoric. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (NY-14) answer to her own "defund the police" history is to wave it off as "Woke 1.0 was crazy," as though a belief system can be retired like a bad haircut instead of renounced with an actual apology.
Meanwhile in Florida, DSA-backed Senate nominee Angie Nixon just knocked off a $16 million war chest with barely a tenth of the money. And congressional candidate Elijah Manley spent his campaign arguing it was "unacceptable" for a white Democrat to hold a historically black seat.
He said that out loud.
On NBC.
So pardon me if I'm skeptical when Democratic leaders suddenly discover that some of this might be a little much.
Haley Stevens says it "certainly makes sense" to ditch El-Sayed's alliance with a streamer who has said he wants to wipe his backside with the Constitution — but that revelation arrived after polling showed El-Sayed trailing Republican Mike Rogers.
Hakeem Jeffries suddenly wants everyone to know he doesn't support Medicare for All or "the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself."
Except Jeffries co-sponsored Medicare for All in 2019.
And again in 2021.
So what happened?
Seven incumbent House Democrats have already lost primaries this cycle to DSA-backed challengers. That's what happened.
Jared Moskowitz, to his credit, actually beat back a DSA challenger in Florida and said plainly what he thought about it.
Good for Moskowitz.
At least somebody said it before a pollster told him to.
Because the Democratic Party had to see this coming. They let the tiger into the tent thinking they could pet him, feed him, and eventually domesticate him.
They cannot.
The DSA's new "Workers Deserve More!" platform calls for abolishing ICE and the Senate, subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to Congress, and defunding police toward eventual abolition.
That's not somebody at Fox News describing the platform.
That's the platform.
And these aren't activists shouting from the sidewalk anymore. They're winning Democratic primaries and defeating Democratic incumbents.
That's the part Jeffries and company suddenly seem very interested in discussing.
Welcome to the conversation.
But voters are entitled to ask where everybody was before the losses started piling up. If these ideas are wrong now, were they wrong two years ago? If El-Sayed's associations are troubling now, why did it take bad polling to make them troubling? If "Woke 1.0 was crazy," who exactly made it crazy?
Those aren't trick questions.
They're the questions you get when political reinvention starts happening faster than voters can refresh their browsers.
And that's what makes this entire summer feel so dishonest. Bogus polls can become news before anybody verifies them. Old positions disappear when they're inconvenient. Yesterday's allies become today's liabilities. Politicians who helped push ideas suddenly announce that they never particularly liked those ideas after all.
Maybe voters won't notice.
I think they will.
Because eventually there is one poll nobody can fake, scrub, delete, or explain away after the fact.
Election Day.
Believe what they've shown you. They've been showing us all summer.