The Democratic debates helped demonstrate the dubiousness of online polls

If you watched Wednesday and Thursday’s Democrat debates, you perhaps came away thinking Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julián Castro, and/or Bernie Sanders’s ideas were among the big winners. But if you didn’t watch and later logged on to the Drudge Report to get caught up, you’d come away with some very different conclusions.

Online trolls worked, with apparent success, to skew post-Democratic debate online polls in favor of dark-horse candidates such as Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang — and in a number of instances, major news outlets took the bait.

Gabbard won a Drudge Report poll conducted after Wednesday’s debate by nearly a 3-1 margin over the second-place finisher, Elizabeth Warren. NBC’s Ben Collins and Ben Popken reported that the result was fueled by posters on 4chan, an online forum known for racism and misogyny, who linked to a number of online polls, including Drudge, and asked fellow users to “GIVE HER YOUR POWER.”

Trolls were up to similar shenanigans last night, according to Ali Breland of Mother Jones. Despite speaking less than any other candidate on stage, Yang — with help from the 4chan message board /pol/ — won the Drudge poll by a more than 2-1 margin over second-place finisher Marianne Williamson, a fellow dark horse who mainly made an impression thanks to her unusual brand of endearing bizarreness.

Yang’s Drudge poll victory came in spite of his admission on Twitter that he didn’t think the debate went particularly well for him — a contrast that says something about how meaningful the poll is.

Online polls are vulnerable to manipulation, including single users voting numerous times for the same person. But they can create a perception that a candidate is hot. This is something the Trump campaign understood back in 2015 and 2016, when Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, agreed to pay a firm to rig a number of online polls in Trump’s favor, including one from Drudge. (The firm in question, RedFinch Solutions LLC, later claimed Cohen stiffed them.)

It’s no secret that online polls are unscientific, but the goal is to create buzz around a certain candidate. Lo and behold, a number of major media outlets — including Washington Examiner, The Hill, Daily Mail, Breitbart, and Daily Caller — credulously reported on the “victories” by Gabbard and Yang. Tucker Carlson had Gabbard on his Fox News show on Thursday and introduced her by touting that she was “the most searched name online” on Wednesday night — another metric prone to manipulation by trolls — and noted that she “won a number of online polls.”

Alluding to the disconnect between the fact that she spoke less than most of the other candidates onstage on Wednesday but performed well in online polls, Gabbard claimed her treatment during the debate was evidence of “clear bias” — music to the ears of those hoping to sow discord in the democratic process.

Headlines touting victories in online polls are obviously useful for candidates like Gabbard and Yang, as they can use them to fundraise and create a perception that there’s grassroots buzz around their campaigns.

But online polls will not in and of themselves keep candidates on the debate stage. While the criteria to qualify for the next Democratic debates, set to be held July 30 and 31 in Michigan, is the same as the ones that were just completed — hitting at least 1 percent support in three different polls, raising money from at least 65,000 unique donors across a number of states — the bar will be raised come the third round of debates in September.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop explained:

First, the polling threshold for inclusion will be raised to 2 percent, in at least four polls between June 28 and August 28.

Second, and even more worryingly for much of the field, candidates would also need 130,000 unique donors to qualify (with at least 400 donors each in 20 states). Meaning they can no longer get in through polling alone, as seven candidates seem likely to do for the first debate. And even those who already reached the 65,000-donor level would have to rake in a lot more support.

Will Gabbard and Yang make the cut? Polls show their support hovering somewhere in the 1-2 percent range, so it’ll likely be close.

Winning polls like Drudge’s can’t hurt their causes. But ultimately, those victories are only meaningful if they translate to fundraising and support that goes beyond 4chan.

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