For months on the campaign trail, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has played the part of a convincing optimist, telling every reporter who would listen that his battered GOP still has a chance in November. “I’m telling you, the polling is wrong,” he insisted to Fox News’s Dana Perino last week. Most people dismissed the likeable party leader as just doing his job as chief cheerleader. But after the latest bombshell, the speaker might not be as off base as Americans thought.

The news that Wedgewood Polling has been faking its numbers — inflating the Democrats’ lead in most instances — hit the campaign trail like an atomic bomb. The firm, whose stats had been cited by everyone from The New York Times to Decision Desk HQ, started raising suspicions when its stats landed well outside the mainstream for radical primary candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, Francesca Hong, and others. Puzzled by how the far-left candidates were overperforming, FiftyPlusOne started quietly investigating and running identical polls. The evidence pointed to massive fraud, which Wedgewood admitted Tuesday.

In a bizarre twist, the organization tried to pawn off the wrongdoing as intentional, an experiment in whether the media would glom on to a certain narrative. “We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?” Wedgewood Polling posted on X. “The short answer: Far too easy.”

The group’s statement noted that they “never intended to sway an election” but hoped to be a “wake-up call” about data integrity and vetting standards — a claim that Democrats furiously reject. “These people are absolute scumbags,” former Kamala Harris advisor Mike Nellis told Fox News. “They can try to claim that they have some moral high ground here, but they lied about their polling data, got caught, and are freaking out because they’ve committed fraud.” He added, “The people responsible for this should be run out of American politics, and if they can be, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

But for real-life candidates, the consequences were devastating. In Michigan, Democratic primary candidate Mallory McMorrow says she was “hounded” by people to drop out of the race, largely because Wedgewood’s phony polling showed her lagging well behind El-Sayed. Donations suddenly dried up and her hopes of winning the race crashed. “Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game,” she lamented on X. “Trust is already at an all-time low. We don’t get out of this mess without rebuilding trust. And media — who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster — needs to take a hard look at what’s legitimate and what’s not.”

Others like Richard Barris of The People’s Pundit were outraged. “We need a complete overhaul of this industry,” he demanded. The scandal proves, as many have long complained, that polls aren’t conducted to inform the public. They’re designed to manipulate voters and drive donations to certain candidates. Revelations like this one only feed the mistrust.

Already, CNN and other outlets were starting to seed the ground for a better midterm performance by Republicans than the headlines seemed to indicate. “If the polls underestimate the Republicans by only three points, they will win both the House and Senate,” the network warned. Nate Silver, the go-to forecaster for The New York Times, admitted that when he deleted a string of fake polls like Wedgewood’s from his calculations, the predictions shifted a point toward Republicans. 

Others believe there’s no way to know how close the races actually are, because Republicans are so difficult to pin down. As Speaker Johnson explained, “You have a lot of polling organizations right now acknowledging that they’re undersampling Republicans, because Republicans don’t want to respond to polls anymore.” His party, he underscores, has been underestimated in October polls “14 of the last 16 elections going back to 1994.” So, “don’t buy it,” the speaker urged. “I’m telling you, I’m on the ground in the swing districts. I am seeing huge energy in crowds. It feels like 2024 to me. That’s not registering in the polls, and we’re fired up.”

Talking with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” the Louisianan insisted that the press is advancing a false narrative. “I believe there’s a concerted effort between the Democrats and the mainstream media, their allies in the media, that are openly biased in their favor. They want to dispirit the Republican side. They want to discourage turnout on the Republican side. And so, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that they prevail in the election. We cannot buy into it,” he implored. “Don’t buy it. I don’t believe there are reliable polls anymore.”

He pointed to the difficulty his own members are having taking their voters’ pulse. “Even some of our own candidates who are doing internal polling … even they have a hard time getting Republicans to respond to polls because Republicans don’t trust pollsters anymore, and they can’t discern when they get a call who’s originating the call. And that is affecting the outcome of the polls.”

At the end of the day, what matters isn’t what the surveys say, but what Americans do. No election is decided by polls — it’s decided by turnout. And that’s where conservatives need to focus their energy leading up to November 3. Ten races in 2024 were decided by 6,000 votes or less in the House, and they ended up determining the majority. “So you’ve got to vote,” the speaker admonished. “If you are a person who appreciates your freedom, loves the American way, and does not want to turn this country over to this communist wave that is overtaking the other party in this country, you’ve got to get out and vote, and … get your family and your friends and everybody at church [involved]. Every single vote literally is going to matter. [These are] going to be close races.”

If you sit out this election, Johnson warned, “You’re derelict in your duty. … You just are. And I say that friend to friend. … We have to fulfill our civic duty. God calls us to be engaged, to be salt and light in our culture, to advance and stand for his principles. And they are under assault right now. If the foundations be destroyed, what would the righteous do? That’s Psalm 113. That is not a rhetorical question for us. It’s something that we get to answer because we have the blessing of living in this free country,” he emphasized. “The civil authorities are ordained [by] God, but we have to be engaged in that process to make sure that the righteous are ruling.”