A while back, WorldNetDaily was pushing a couple polls it commissioned — one claiming that “a startling two-thirds of likely GOP voters believe the new House speaker should be someone from outside Congress,” and another asserting that 85 percent of Americans believe the country is “off on the wrong track.”
A few weeks ago, WND posted more polls, including a strange finding that Hillary Clinton was found to be “least appealing” at three times the rate of Donald Trump and that Clinton was mostly likely to “cut them off in traffic.”
We’d never heard of WND’s polling partner, Clout Research, so we checked into them. And look who’s running the place: Fritz Wenzel.
If you’ll recall, Wenzel is a former newspaper political columnist who reportedly did work for a Republican member of Congress while still working at the paper and who, while still at the paper, was accused of burying financial misdeeds involving another Republican congressman — both serious ethical breaches.
Wenzel had previously done highly skewed polling — some to the point that it was effectively push polling — for WND under the name Wenzel Strategies, and as far as we can tell, Clout Research is simply a renamed Wenzel Strategies. The renaming may be a rebranding strategy given Wenzel’s historical unreliability; Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com gave Wenzel Strategies an overall grade of D for accuracy.
But Wenzel hasn’t lost WND as a client — he does deliver the skewed results WND demands, after all.