“One survey found that 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for the Biden-Harris ticket if they had known about the Biden laptop.” — Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, at a hearing titled “Twitter’s Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story,” Feb. 8
“The Media Research Center polled Democratic voters in 2020 swing states and found that 17 percent wanted to change their vote if they had known the contents and evidence of the New York Post story.”
— Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.), at the same hearing
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The poll in question was done by the Polling Company, a conservative pollster founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of the Media Research Center. MRC is a conservative organization that runs Newsbusters, a website that documents what it perceives as a liberal bias in the media. (The website regularly criticizes The Fact Checker.)
This was an online survey, conducted Nov. 9-18, 2020, of 1,750 Biden voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The voters were randomly selected from opt-in participants, with an effort to ensure proportional and representative demographics, the poll says.
The strange thing about this poll is the questions. These were not neutral questions designed to elicit opinions. Instead, they were framed to test negative messages about the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket or positive messages about the Trump administration in an effort to see whether any of these statements would be effective in moving votes.
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Oddly, despite the statements by Comer and Fallon, none of the questions specifically mention the Hunter Biden laptop or the New York Post articles about it. The closest approximation is this one:
“At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?”
Notice how the question raises the prospect of an FBI investigation, a “corrupt financial arrangement” and “tens of millions of dollars” for Joe Biden and his family? To this day, none of those allegations, a staple of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, has been proven.
