Tea at Trianon: Manipulated Polls

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 22, 2026

Manipulated Polls

From The Enterprise:

A $20 bill that a bank teller miscounts is still a $20 bill. A $20 bill printed in a basement is something else. Median Strategies appears to have done the second thing to two elections in one week, inventing the voters, the interviews, the methodology, and the results, then posting the product under a corporate-sounding name the day before Wisconsin Democrats chose a nominee for governor. Calling the stunt a "social experiment" after it was exposed does not convert attempted election fraud into political science.

On August 10, one day before Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, an anonymous shop calling itself Median Strategies published a supposed survey putting Francesca Hong at 46.3% and David Crowley at 22.6%. The release came with a sample, field dates, a methodology statement, and a name that sounded like one you might already have heard of. Someone reading it on a phone the night before the primary would have seen the ordinary furniture of a real poll and had no reason, from the face of the document, to treat it as fiction. The poll did not exist.

Crowley won the August 11 primary 39.8% to Hong's 39.3%, a margin of 3,796 votes. Median had overstated Hong's advantage by more than 24 points. That gap is not a polling miss, because no voters were interviewed and no sample was ever in the field.

Median did not confess when the returns came in. On August 12, it behaved like a legitimate firm that had simply gotten Wisconsin wrong "by quite a margin," the kind of rueful note a real shop posts after a blowup, the kind of note that keeps the brand intact for whatever it planned to publish next. The next release arrived the following day. (Read more.)