Brendan Carr Threatens News Broadcasters Over ‘Fake Polls’

Brendan Carr, Trump’s attack dog at the FCC, is warning the polls are “fake,” and that he’s ready to do something about it.

“During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm,” he claimed on X.

“Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations,” he added, adopting Trumpian terminology and capitalization.

There’s something to this; as we’ve noted on TPM, there’s been a weird spate of truly fake polls, many seemingly created by AI. Fake polling outfits have been discovered twice in recent months; when exposed, the people behind them claimed they were simply conducting a “social experiment.” It looks, more realistically, like a bid to rig the betting markets.

But there’s also a long tradition of both sides — and especially Republicans — crying foul when they don’t like what polls are saying. Trump’s movement has taken this to a new level in recent years, denouncing information it doesn’t like as fake and a bid to, as Carr described it this week, “interfere” in the “regular functioning of the electoral process.” Trump’s ridiculous and now-dismissed lawsuit against Ann Selzer — the storied pollster whose very-wrong survey in 2024 showed Harris winning Iowa — is one recent, dramatic example of this.

Carr’s invocation of the term “news distortion” describes a real violation of rules on which the FCC is empowered to take action, but this is not that. “Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should ​answer for it, but broadcasters ​who report publicly available polling ⁠data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the Democratic commissioner on the FCC’s board, said. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do ​not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

Given this, it makes sense to see Carr’s message as primarily aimed at Trump and his allies, a form of cope, as Republicans fret that the grim numbers for their side ahead of the midterms will send the message to voters that it’s not worth turning out. The latest scandal around a fake pollster — “Wedgewood Polls” — arrives at a convenient time for this push, allowing Republicans to dramatically overstate “Wedgewood’s” influence.

“I’ve been sounding the alarm that the polls are WRONG,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wrote in an X post flagged by Josh Marshall last night. “IGNORE THE POLLS, and GO VOTE,” he wrote. “We have 13 days to SAVE AMERICA!”

Senate Intelligence Democrats Issue Warning About Election

The top Democrats on congressional intelligence committees said yesterday that they fully expect the Trump administration to claim “foreign interference” next month as it seeks to undermine confidence in the election.

• Democrats said they planned to counter this messaging if they have reason to think it is false. “If, at noon on Election Day, the president announced that the Iranians have undertaken operation, I’m on TV saying ‘I’m Gang of Eight and I have received no such briefing, no such information, and I have no reason to believe that this is accurate,'” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking member on the House intelligence committee.
• “Now, does that end the crisis? No, but that’s the first step,” he added.
• The idea of foreign interference has loomed large for election denialists, who claim, for various baseless reasons, that other countries can control our voting machines, and that this is cause for Trump to declare a national emergency or for his administration to take other, drastic actions.
• Jared Holt, a longtime researcher of the far-right, writes that Trump-aligned figures are increasingly talking about elections as a “national security” issue, but that broader calls for a national emergency declaration around the 2026 midterms have not really caught on within the online spaces where Trump’s most hard-core supporters gather.
• A recent poll by ABC News and the Washington Post found that “7 in 10 lack confidence that President Donald Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose.”

Tabs

• Republicans have relentlessly spread the myth that James Talarico is himself trans, or has pro-trans positions that they assume will turn off Texas voters. A fascinating investigation by the 19th and Uncloseted Media finds that these claims and conspiracy theories were very much not in the discourse ahead of Talarico’s run. In the day and a half after he won the primary, these messages exploded across social media, pushed by prominent Republican and reactionary accounts. It’s the most cut-and-dried look I’ve seen at the coordinated efforts by online influencers to shape the conversation — often in ridiculous or false ways — during this year’s midterm.
• Crypto-aligned donors have spent a whopping $55 million opposing Sherrod Brown’s run for Senate in Ohio, Politico reports.

Man of the Hour

This one is a weird one. Earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that Marty O’Donnell, running as a Republican for Congress in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District, runs an online forum where neo-Nazi rhetoric abounds. One user mused that the Nazis “did some good things” and another asked, “Was Hitler really an evil guy?” Another odd detail of this story: The forum is devoted to the “Halo” video game franchise, for which O’Donnell, the candidate, wrote the music. When he decided to run for Congress, he suggested to the die-hard gamers on the site that they become “The Marty Army,” which, apparently, they did. O’Donnell’s Democratic opponent, Susie Lee, is favored to win.

Are We at War?

“The U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed specific plans for renewed strikes against Iran after the American midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.