Morning all. Hosting an important event at 2pm ET today - Colette Delawalla of Stand Up For Science joins us to talk about their new campaign to Stop Vought. Save Science. Click on this link right before 2pm today to join us live. Going to be a good one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As we’ve been discussing here Trump is on an extraordinary losing streak - the House voted against him on major Iran and Ukraine bills last week; his ballroom, slush fund, and takeover off the Kennedy Center have been thwarted; a court found his second round of tariffs to be illegal; the wars he and Putin have launched are failing now; Orban fell, and last night pro-Russia forces were routed in an Armenian election; the Pope has become a public antagonist and Xi ate his lunch in Beijing; inflation remains very high here in the US and the Fed is now more likely to raise than lower interest rates; due to his malfeasance screwworm has returned to the US, Ebola is raging in Africa, and measles is becoming great again across the country; his candidate for Iowa governor got beat in his primary last week, and we got the Senate candidate we wanted; he is far more unpopular today than his point in 2018, a blow out election year for Democrats; he is undeniable cognitive and phyiscal decline. His powers are clearly ebbing; a blue wave is forming; he’s lost control of Congress, a dangerous development for a deeply corrupt man; global leaders continue to defy, even mock him…..
So the big blubbery baby man, enraged at his ebbing powers, just lost it on a Meet The Press released yesterday. The most fiery part of the interview is above. You simply must watch it - bile, bloating, burnt orange, insults and an old, addled man clearly in profound decline.
But I want to drill down a bit this morning on the substance of the exchange, the matter that caused Trump to lose his shit and walk off set. His ridiculous insistence that Democrats routinely cheat in elections that Republicans lose, and that we can only win through cheating. In his diseased and terrified mind he needs to lean hard into this argument as a pretense for denying a peaceful transfer of power next January given the way the elections are heading. He has put a ridiculous hack Bill Pulte in charge of ODNI to explicitly help him do this.
So as a dry run to what they are going to try this November they are attempting to turn the slow California vote count into a confirmation of our perpetual rigging of elections. Part of the anger comes from how much investment the right wing noise machine had made in their new Republican heroes in California. Here is some of the fluffery LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt had gotten from the Free Press, Bari Weiss’ former publication, for example:
Then this weekend we saw Pratt drop into third, and out of the runoff, in the LA Mayor’s race, and Steve Hilton drop into second in the Governor’s race:
In the interview listen to Trump’s rage as he describes what is happening in California, as if he really believes these late votes are somehow fraudulent and that his two guys are being robbed. They are the words and sentiment of a paranoid madman.
I say that this is a dry run for the Novembers election and its aftermath for how we are seeing the broader right-wing ecosystem both build up the Rs and then shout “rigging” as they fall. Here’s Judd Legum this morning, in his Substack Popular Information, reporting on the role Peter Thiel-backed Polymarket is playing in spreading the “rigging” narrative:
Polymarket, one of the dominant players in the prediction market industry, promotes itself as a source of objective truth. In 2024, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan called his company a “global truth machine“ and bragged the company would be “actually solving misinformation.” After Polymarket became the official prediction market of X, Coplan said the partnership joined together the “two top truth seeking apps on the internet.”
However, as Semafor first reported, in the wake of the California primary election last Tuesday, Polymarket has sponsored posts from far-right influencers on X pushing election conspiracies and disinformation. Popular Information has uncovered a network of at least 16 influencers1, with a collective audience of 13 million, publishing election-related misinformation in posts sponsored by Polymarket.
The conspiracies involve the Los Angeles mayoral primary. Like other California races, all candidates compete in a single primary and the top two candidates advance to the general election. Early returns on election night showed incumbent Karen Bass (D) leading the field and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt (R) in second place. Pratt has gained a following through viral AI-generated videos depicting him as Batman and Bass as the Joker.
But California’s vote-counting process has been slow and later returns have favored another candidate, Nithya Raman (D), over Pratt. Many Californians vote by mail, and these ballots take longer to count. Based on the breakdown of the mail-in ballots, most analysts expect Raman, not Pratt, to advance to the general.
In numerous Polymarket-sponsored posts, far-right influencers, without evidence, claim that Raman’s improving fortunes are evidence of fraud. Former InfoWars correspondent Owen Shroyer, who has over 470,000 followers on X, posted that “California just keeps counting until the Democrat wins.” The post was labeled as a “paid partnership” with Polymarket.
Previously, Shroyer was a named defendant in a defamation lawsuit filed by the family of a child killed at Sandy Hook and was found liable by default. Shroyer was also sentenced to 60 days in jail for his role in the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. “In the months prior to January 6, Shroyer spread election disinformation paired with violent rhetoric to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers,” prosecutors wrote. “Shroyer helped create January 6.”
Here’s what disinfo analyst Renee DiResta wrote about what the right has built around Pratt in a new, remarkable analysis:
The Pratt feed really was inescapable. In certain parts of X and TikTok, he was once again as much a fixture as he was on the gossip blogs during his reality-TV heyday. He has more than a million followers on X. A fan-made AI video casting Pratt as Batman and Karen Bass as the Joker pulled more than 5 million views; another, featuring pilates moms confessing they were voting for Pratt, did nearly two million. The campaign barely bothered with traditional paid media, leaning on clips and boosting fan-made content while his rivals spent on TV. The Extremely Online right-wing influencer machine boosted him (for better or worse; Steve Bannon presciently remarked that he would endorse him but didn’t want to hurt him in LA).
When your feed is wall-to-wall Pratt — clips, endorsements, memes, weird AI propaganda — it is easy to slide from “Pratt is popular online” to “Pratt is popular.” But a clip with three million views just tells you the clip did numbers online, and presumably a lot of people who liked it are nowhere near Los Angeles. The engagement number alone does not tell you much about how a city of millions will fill out their ballots.
I pulled up polling data to see where the numbers were as Pratt’s campaign went viral. Polling experts, please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, Pratt advanced from about 14% in the March UC Berkeley IGS/LA Times poll to 22% in their final survey. That final poll had Bass at 26% and Nithya Raman at 25%. The only survey that ever showed him ahead was a 400-person McLaughlin & Associates poll — a Republican pollster — that contradicted every other survey of the race but Breitbart touted it. As the clips spread online, Pratt’s unfavorability climbed from 28% in March, when most likely Angeleno voters had no opinion of him at all, to 57% by late May. (Raman’s recognition increased, and her favorability climbed.) I went back and looked at Zohran Mamdani, who also dominated social media on his way to actually winning New York; his online momentum did show up as positive trends in the polls.
But the extremely online MAGAsphere on X seem to have equated high online engagement with high odds that Spencer Pratt was going to win, or make it to a runoff. The former was always a serious long shot. This is Los Angeles! Pratt is a Republican candidate, with President Trump’s public blessing, running in a city where GOP registration is under 15%. The last Republican mayor of Los Angeles was elected in 1993, and left office in 2001. Most people in LA hate Trump. They may be very frustrated with Bass and very, very reluctantly voting for her again, but it’s unrealistic to believe they would elect Pratt in a landslide. A runoff seemed possible, but the third candidate had to be considered.
So did they take the loss like adults? Well, consider this post by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Quote-tweeting a post about Pratt’s declining odds on Polymarket, he wrote that California “keeps dumping votes,” that the ballot drops “always seem to go one way,” and asked whether officials were counting “until you get the result you want.”
The presence of McLaughlin here, a Trump-affiliated pollster, is significant. For McLaughlin just played a similar role in the recent Hungarian elections - creating fraudulent, “narrative” polling to create an illusion of strength for Orban’s illiberal party Fidesz:
The use of fake polling to drive a false narrative was at the core of why a red wave never came in 2022; and it is something that we just saw executed in the New Jersey Governor’s race last year. Look at the polling in the final weeks in New Jersey - every right aligned pollster has the race close, within margin of error. Every independent poll has Sherill with solid leads, outside of the margin of error. Like in Hungary the right aligned polls were off by more than 10 points, something that is very, very hard to do if you are doing legitimate polling - and they were all off by 10+ points. All of them.
Here’s how one of the largest news channels in the New York media market, PIX11, owned by right-aligned Nexstar, which also owns the Hill, played their final poll which ended up being off by 13 points.
And of course these right-aligned polls showing Sherril weak and Ciattarelli strong were heavily amplified by the right aligned media in the closing weeks. I know for concerns about Sherrill stumbling were voiced here daily even though all the public polls showed her with solid, out the margin sturdy leads.
Here’s how Di Resta describes this process of manufacturing a false understanding of an election in her terrific piece:
The LA mayoral primary’s devolution into conspiracy tropes, Polymarket screenshots, and Grok fact-checks is useful because it shows a script we are going to see again in 2026: viral candidate overperforms in the feed, ordinary ballot-counting reveals a different reality, and the people who conflated engagement with votes decide that there’s something suspicious about the count.
Network scientists at USC explained it years ago: your social media feed is dominated by the loudest, best-connected nodes. Their opinions can feel like the majority consensus even when it’s not. You might be thinking you’re seeing the population, when you’re really seeing the loudest people. The term they gave for misjudging where prevailing opinion is based on what you see around you is called the majority illusion.
Using these tactics Republicans successfully created a false impression of a red wave in 2022 (see this NYT analysis “The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative” about the role of fake polling in the 2022 elections). I think these tactics played an important role in helping drive the late-breaking vote to Trump in 2024, as fueled by hundreds of right-aligned polls Trump took the lead in the right-aligned RealClearPolitics national average around October 26, 2024 — by just 0.1 points, with Trump at 48.4% and Harris at 48.3%. Notably, the last time Trump had led in the RCP average before that was August 4, the day before Harris formally secured the Democratic nomination. So Harris led the RCP national average for essentially the entire period from mid-August through late October — roughly 11 weeks — before Trump edged ahead in the final 10 days. The narrative in right-aligned media in the closing days of 2024 - using all these tactics described above - was Trump surging/strong/winning, Harris declining/weak/losing. Here’s how Polymarket was selling the 2024 election in the closing days, data like in LA this year, was amplified through paid ads from Polymarket throughout social media (I saw them all the time in those finals days). Crypto adjacent voters across the country - young men - were flooded with “Trump is winning” on social media in the final days of 2024:
Let’s look at how late voters broke in 2024. From the Exit Polls:
Here is how the main forecasters saw the election in the closing days - close, competitive, slight lean to Harris and certainly not “Trump winning”:
While these illicit tactics did not work in Hungary, or in LA, or in New Jersey, they did work in 2022 and I think they did play a role in 2024. And let’s be clear - the right wouldn’t be doing all this stuff unless they believed it was something that can help them win.
Trump knows he is losing, and his powers are ebbing - hence the rage in the Meet The Press interview - and we have to expect he is going to do whatever it takes to win this November and prevent a peaceful transfer of power in January. More on that in our new series, Winning In An Evolving Battlefield, and more to come on that from us here at Hopium in the coming days. For what they are doing around Spencer Pratt now should be seen as a warm up for what is come this November and afterwards, and we cannot once again get caught napping or unaware…..
Keep working hard everyone. We have a country to save, elections to win, and a peaceful transfer of power to ensure, together! - Simon
