The Numbers Were Invented. The Trust Was Real.

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The pollster confessed before anyone in the newsroom caught on. On Tuesday night, Wedgewood Polls, a young firm whose numbers had made their way into The New York Times’ poll tracker and onto the pages of Newsweek, admitted it had invented them. The firm said it had “no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases.” It said it was testing how easily a fake operation could be taken seriously. Its answer: “The short answer: Far too easy.” Consider what that means. Nobody hacked a database or forged a document. Someone made up percentages, put

A Warning Shot at the Class ’27 — and an Ethics Complaint.

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Picture the kid. Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Political science degree, some debt, one good suit bought on sale. He’s been refreshing USAJobs at midnight. He wants to be in the building where the country gets run, even if all he does is collate binders for a deputy assistant secretary nobody’s heard of. Now picture a United States senator telling him, more or less: Go ahead. See what happens. That’s the gist of what Michigan Democrat Elissa Slotkin told a University of Chicago audience last week. She wants graduates to look at a job in the Trump administration and see trouble, not

Carville Warns His Party That a Small Majority Is a Trap.

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James Carville has spent 40 years telling Democrats how to win. This week he told them what kind of winning he can’t stand. It isn’t losing. It’s winning small. “I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats win by five,” Carville told Bill Kristol on The Bulwark’s “Bulwark on Sunday” podcast, posted Oct. 18. “Because if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.” That’s the Democratic Socialists of America. And that’s a party strategist, two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms, saying out loud that his own side’s left flank scares him more than the

One Week, Three Questions, and a Gentle Shove.

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The president did it gently. In Washington, that’s sometimes the hardest way to hear it. On the South Lawn Friday, President Trump told reporters he’d pulled his new press secretary aside just before walking out. His message to her: “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to… I think you should reconsider.” Then, almost to himself: “Maybe it’s not for her.” Katie Zacharia had held the job for one week. Asked whether that meant she was fired, Trump waved it off. “No no. I want her to have a good life.” She’d “been brutalized by the media,”

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