☕️ SCOOBY DID ☙ Wednesday, October 21, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The astonishing fake pollster that ‘fooled’ the credulous New York Times, moved Cook's ratings, and pried $1.2M out of Democrats — plus an AI prompt that builds your own ballot cheat sheet. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your terrific mid-week roundup includes: a do-it-yourself AI prompt that turns “just tell me who to vote for” into a printable one-page cheat sheet, plus one Florida judge who definitely should not be retained; a “pollster” that sat in the New York Times average all season, then admitted it was all fake, two minutes after DMing an F-bomb to the people who caught it; how one fake Mississippi poll moved Cook’s rating and pried loose $1.2 million in Democrat money; the 21-year-old who beat Wedgewood to the “it was just an experiment” excuse by two months; and a teaser for tomorrow’s Deep State story, which has definitely not been forgotten.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

In most places, early voting has already begun (or will begin soon). And, just as I’ve been reassuring you since last year, corporate media’s overexcited predictions of an anti-Trump ‘blue wave’ have failed to appear. It’s even hard to see a blue ripple. As we thought it would, it looks exactly like a traditional midterm election— and it will be decided based on turnout.

We need another round of “beat the cheat,” “too big to rig,” and getting our souls to the polls. I have something to help us boost turnout.

This year, Republicans are being encouraged to vote early if possible, because in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 cycles, we learned about election-day ‘glitches’ that somehow only hit red counties. This prevented some people from voting at all or required them to wait around for hours. Apparently, all sorts of things can go wrong (for Republicans).

For example, in my bright blue county of Alachua, during the 2022 primaries, they flat ran out of Republican ballots in the rural areas and smaller red cities. Headline from the liberal Gainesville Sun:

So this year, especially in precincts under Democrat control, Republicans are advised to vote early in order to avoid last-minute accidents.

🪖 Let’s be honest. There are lots of reasons people avoid voting, especially in midterm elections. First, there’s the constant fear of using the wrong kind of pen to bubble in the ballot form. But the absolute worst part of voting is feeling stupid.

We are asked to figure out whether to pick Scott Schofleheiser or Ingrid Popplefield for tax collector, or decide on the spot whether the state constitution should be amended to allow tangible property taxes to increase no more than 1.5% per agricultural administrative review period during each biennial 10-year cycle, at which point you stop reading and start Christmas-treeing faster than a high school student realizing he was running out of time to finish the SAT.

But now we have AI. (Or SI.) So I made you a prompt to create a very nifty, personalized voter guide for your specific precinct. (Note that, based on my tests, some AIs will snootily refuse to make a voting recommendation at all, in which case just switch to a different AI. But even among those who deign to help, quality varies. Grok, for instance, did a great job. ChatGPT, not so much. Gab failed by pretending to misunderstand what I was asking for. Perplexity made a solid effort.)

The voter guide this prompt builds includes a 1-pager that you can hand to busy people who say things like “I just need somebody to tell me who to vote for.” These folks are willing to do their duty, and can vote “R”, but they don’t know where to start with all the rest. They feel understandably reluctant to inflict their guesses on everyone else.

But with the 1-page cheat sheet this prompt will help you make for them, they can walk into the polling place with confidence. Which makes them likelier to go.

You need only change one thing in the prompt: put your (or someone else’s) address in the first line, so the “superintelligent” agent can super-intelligently find your specific voting precinct. (Feel free to edit the ideological descriptions to match your own preferences. I included it only as a guide. But you only need to put in the address.)

Look up my precinct from my street address: [ADDRESS, CITY, STATE, ZIP].

Draft me an attractive, easy-to-use, personalized voter guide for the November 3rd election. Begin by finding a sample ballot from my local supervisor of elections. End with a printable 1-page cheat sheet laid out like the ballot that I can take with me when voting.

List my early voting locations, dates, and hours (closest first), my Election Day polling place, and the mail-ballot request deadline.

Flag the candidates and issues I am likely to vote for, using what you already know about me plus: I am a pro-Christian, pro-border-enforcement, pro-capitalism, pro-medical-freedom, pro-life, pro-Trump, pro-merit, anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-globalism, anti-woke, anti-DEI, Rush Limbaugh-style small-government conservative.

For each candidate/issue, tell me what the state/local GOP recommends. If a candidate or issue is endorsed or recommended by state/local Democratic party, mark it with a red warning label to that effect.

For candidates: Who has endorsed each recommended candidate?

For issues/amendments/initiatives: Quote reliable conservative organizations (e.g. Heritage, Federalist, or state-level conservative groups) that issued voter guides. Highlight if there are disagreements or “pro/con” choices.

For appointed judges (retention votes): identify who appointed them. Check news reports from decisions and evaluate whether the judge’s rulings have displayed a liberal/progressive character. Let me know if any reliable conservative organization is for/against retention.

For incumbent elected judges: check news reports and let me know if any partisan leaning is apparent, or if the judge has any history of releasing violent criminals who reoffended. Give me whatever statistics are available (age, length of service, political registration).
For new judicial candidates: check public sources (donation records, voting history, news) and the candidate’s website and list or guess at their political party.

If a section doesn’t apply to my ballot, say so and skip it. Link a source for every recommendation. If you cannot verify a fact (a candidate’s party, an endorsement, a ruling), say so. Do not guess.
Ask me questions if necessary to make recommendations on particular candidates or issues.

If you try it, let everyone know in the comments whether it worked well. If you tinker with it, tell us what you tweaked or improved.

NOTE: Floridians whose ballots include “Retain Judge Joseph Lewis Jr?” should vote NO. Do not retain Judge Lewis. He was the lone appellate judge (fortunately outvoted) to dissent in my successful mask lawsuit, Green v. Alachua County. In other words, Judge Lewis favors medical mandates. So.

Judge Lewis wanted everyone to keep their masks on. Wait till you see how ironic that is.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Alert C&C readers already distrust election polls, as they should. But wait. It’s so much worse than we thought. Today we discover a sordid, unbelievable story that corporate media is trying to sweep under the rug. The New York Times ran only an editor’s note. Newsweek reported, “Fake polling firm duped media in ‘social experiment’” They were duped!

Wedgewood Polls is a new 2026 polling service included in corporate media’s aggregated results and relied on by the major parties and candidates. Newsweek reported that Mallory McMorrow quit the Michigan Senate primary over a Wedgewood poll, allowing Abdul El Sayed to win the Democrat primary by a nose.

Yesterday at 6:19 pm (note that time), after publishing results all midterm season, Wedgewood debunked itself in a dramatic social media post:

“We wanted to test a simple hypothesis,” Wedgewood’s press release innocently began. “How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction and be taken seriously?” It answered its own question: “Far too easy.”

“Despite having no history,” it explained, “no formal credentials, or real data, Wedgewood’s fabricated numbers were added to major polling aggregators like the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, were given instant credibility on air and by outlets such as MS NOW, and were repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.” (Note also its reference to FiftyPlusOne, which will be important in a moment.)

This presented an obvious problem. “The ease with which unverified figures” —meaning fake— “were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.” If you suspected media blindly accepts anything from any source, so long as it says what reporters want to hear, you were right.

“If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations,” the announcement mused, “then the standards for how polling data is vetted and reported must change.” At minimum.

Apparently, the media and polling aggregators check their sources the same way California checks citizenship before registering voters: with a bucket on their head.

Perhaps sensing that its announcement sounded sketchy, Wedgewood raced to reassure everybody that it never meant to mislead anybody. Not really. It was purely a science experiment. “Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election,” it purred —but don’t ask Mallory McMorrow— “or permanently mislead the public. It was designed as a wake-up call.”

Brrrrrriiiinnnngg!! Wake up, sheeple! Well, we’re slowly waking up. So that worked.

Already we see a whole tray of scrambled eggs dumped over the faces of New York Times reporters (of course) and the rest of corporate media. And it condemns the entire industry; if it’s this easy to publish fake poll numbers, what good is any polling data? So.

But the biggest question of all remained: Has Wedgewood stopped lying? In other words, it admits to lying about being a legit polling company. So it’s fair to ask whether it is now telling the truth about running a legit media experiment. Or— was it always a psyop?

You know me. I never take this kind of thing at face value. I had to start digging. Did Wedgewood come clean two weeks before the election to avoid skewing the results any more than it already has? Or was there another reason?

You’ll never guess what I discovered next.

🔥 The first thing I checked was what kinds of poll results Wedgewood made up. This was a test. If, as they claimed, they were legitimately trying not to influence elections, they would want to keep their fake results as even-handed as possible, sometimes skewing toward one party, other times leaning the other way, and never showing big shifts that could alter the composition of early and mail-in voters.

Shocker. What I found instead was that Wedgewood always reported favorably for Democrats and DSA candidates. Strange!

Wedgewood’s polls consistently made the most ludicrous predictions, like showing James “Where’s Waldo” Talarico in red Texas somehow running +3 over beloved State Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Mohammed Abdul “Intifada Joe” El-Sayed (or whatever his name is) leading in Michigan by +6.

All the big media reporters gobbled up Wedgewood’s calorie-free data like it was all-you-can-eat shrimp night at Red Lobster. For instance, even “super pollster” Nate Silver relied on Wedgewood’s fake figures:

A week ago on October 14th, with early voting primed to begin, Wedgewood even claimed its polling showed a blue wave washing over deep-red Mississippi, with the Democrats’ longshot Senate candidate closing within 4 points. The Democrat, Scott Colom, trumpeted the poll as “tied.” (Rounding to zero, apparently.)

You know, in hindsight, one wonders whether this proves they really were trolling the media. Nobody could believe this kind of thing, right?

Welp, media ran with it. And Democrats believed it. Hilariously, Wedgewood’s fake poll showing a non-existent blue wave in a red state caused the “nonpartisan” aggregator Cook Political Report to shift Mississippi from “solid Republican” to “leans Republican,” which in turn caused Democrats to dump $1.2 million into the race. Headline from the Hill, yesterday:

Ironically, Wedgewood’s fake polls showing Democrat blue waves could be hurting Democrats more than helping, by head-faking them into pouring badly needed cash into Mississippi.

So that was the first discovery: Wedgewood’s results seemed always to ‘prove’ that the blue wave that does not exist actually existed. But then I found the smoking gun.

🔥 FiftyPlusOne is an influential new (2025) polling aggregator that was spun off by veterans of Nate Silver’s ‘538’ group and some former ABC political reporters. FiftyPlusOne is widely cited by major media platforms like the New York Times. This morning, I discovered FiftyPlusOne’s Substack blog entry yesterday, which appeared to be related:

Ironically, Wedgewood’s insane Mississippi poll did perhaps go too far. It made FiftyPlusOne’s veteran pollsters suspicious. It was too good to be true. So FiftyPlusOne quietly ordered up its own Mississippi poll, to double-check. (Retail value, $900). That poll did not detect a blue wave, and did not match Wedgewood’s raw data, either. Whoops.

So, FiftyPlusOne said, it planned to expose Wedgewood today, the 21st. Being professionals (and probably under advice of counsel), yesterday they sent a copy of their exposé, asked Wedgewood for a comment before publishing, and set a midnight deadline.

That request apparently prompted Wedgewood to run its mea culpa before FiftyPlusOne could publish. Here is the story, in FiftyPlusOne’s own words:

FiftyPlusOne brought receipts. It screen-capped Wedgewood’s obscene reply, delivered via an X direct message:

Remember the time stamp from the top of this segment? Wedgewood posted its announcement that it was an “experiment” at 6:19 pm. As the screen grab above shows, two minutes before that —at 6:17 pm— in an abundance of polling professionalism gave FiftyPlusOne the bird: “Our official response to your article: F-ck you.” (It was even more personal than that; FiftyPlusOne redacted the person’s name who the invective had been aimed at.)

At 6:17, in private, it was “F-ck you.” Two minutes later at 6:19, in public, it was, “we hope this experiment sparks a necessary conversation about data integrity.”

Goodness! Who knew this polling business could get so … intimate?

Whatever else it proves, Wedgewood’s intemperate response does not sound like a firm delighted to be caught— even though their 6:19 public “experiment” announcement complained that no one noticed their fake polls. Nor did its announcement mention FiftyPlusOne’s exposé (or the F-bomb). Instead, it seems like Wedgewood would have preferred to keep on reporting fake polls right through the election.

Try to follow me here. If Wedgewood, as it insisted, was running an experiment to test whether anyone noticed, it should have been happy that FiftyPlusOne did notice. Haha, you finally got us! What took so long? Instead, they slid into FiftyPlusOne’s DMs and shouted obscenities. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

Think about it. If Wedgewood hadn’t gotten greedy and stretched to grasp a Mississippi blue wave, no one would have noticed.

🔥 There’s one more dot to connect. Progressives will inevitably cry this proves nothing; it’s ultra-rare! Just because one of a dozen or so polling groups was totally fake doesn’t prove there’s any wider problem with polling data, right? That’s only like 8%. Or is it?

Behold the headline from the UK Guardian, just over a month ago. Another pollster, penetrating the ecosystem:

So, LOL, Wedgewood’s “experiment” excuse isn’t even new. They copied it from a 21-year-old. Everybody is running the same experiment! Here is how the Guardian described the earlier fake-polling story, back on August 20th:

The downfall began when Rahil Prakash’s fake polling company, Median Strategies, published a “poll” showing LA Mayor Karen Bass leading DSA candidate Nithya “Noodle” Ramen by +11 points. Mayor Bass immediately trumpeted the results:

At least now we know what Democrats mean when they say, “doing the work.”

But the unbelievable poll results drew the ire of democratic socialists who, unlike Republicans, won’t let sleeping polls lie. Like Wedgewood, Mr. Prakash got greedy. He was unmasked by the Guardian, which checked his website’s domain registration, and then deployed the “experiment” excuse.

So, that’s two fake polling companies that imploded in disgrace in the same election cycle. Both pro-Democrat. The unanswered question is: how many more Wedgewoods are there?

We need to be fair. Both fake pollsters were (eventually) caught. It’s legitimate to consider whether this means the system is actually working. Is self-policing effectively enforcing professional norms and standards? The equally honest answer is nobody can say.

Again, had they not advanced guffaw-producing polling results and tangled with the DSA, neither Wedgewood nor Median Strategies would have been caught. If they had been a little cleverer, they could have kept on faking polls until the actual election results once again showed the polls overestimating Democrat performance.

Never has a poll-weary nation needed the heroic Scooby Doo team like it does now. Who else is under the mask?

🔥 That’s all we have time for today. But I wish to assure alert readers that I have not overlooked the even more disgraceful and disgusting exposé story washing across social media yesterday. Independent conservative investigator DataRepublican’s exposé terrified the Washington Post so badly it ran a cover story within hours. I’m not sure anything like it has ever happened before.

We’ll get to that insidious Deep State story tomorrow.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Do not miss tomorrow’s blockbuster post. In the meantime, ignore the fake polls and GET OUT THE VOTE. Meet me back here tomorrow morning for another serving of astonishing, essential news and extra-caffeinated commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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