Twenty-one-year-old Rahil Prakash is the person who published a number of fake polls that entered the media ecosystem.
He says that he was inspired to create his phony polls after Michigan primary polls totally blew the Democrat race between Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, aka Abdul El-Sayed, and Haley Stevens. El-Sayed barely squeaked out a win when poll after poll showed him up by double digits.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” he told the far-left Guardian. “And as it turned out, it could.”
Prakash created a website called Median Strategies and released bogus polls for the Democrat primary in the Wisconsin governor’s race, the Los Angeles mayoral race, and two statewide Nevada races.
“Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, touted Median polling data after it appeared to put her ahead of her election challenger by more than 10 percentage points,” the Guardian adds. “The poll was also cited by the California Post. A widely followed polling aggregator on X also shared the group’s Nevada poll[.]”
“[S]everal credible polling organizations did not aggregate Median polling because they could not verify its methodology.”
“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not. I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own,” said Prakash. “I’ll apologize straight out to the campaigns of Karen Bass, Nithya Raman and Francesca Hong for this,” the Guardian reported.
The fake Median poll put Francesca Hong up by 20 points. She lost by 0.5 points.
What’s so funny about this is that Median’s bogus poll was not the worst. Marquette, a so-called “legitimate” pollster, had Hong ahead by 22. PPP had her up by 18.
At least Median admits its polling is bogus. Fox News, Quinnipiac, and a number of others are equally bogus, as far as I can tell, but continue to be treated seriously. The whole field of polling is a joke.
Median snuck into the ecosystem because nobody really cares if polls are accurate; we all know they are not, so who cares? Had I seen the Median polls, I would have thought nothing of firing them off on social media. Polling no longer matters. It’s just content now, and anyone who takes polling seriously is a dumbass.
Polling is all about shaping public opinion, not reflecting it; it’s all about manipulating public opinion, not measuring it.
This guy did us a favor. He further damaged the credibility of polling and of the media. That’s a wonderful thing as far as I’m concerned.
Fake polls. Media polls. Potato-potahhhtow.
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