PHILADELPHIA — It’s a new year full of fresh electoral ambitions for Doug Mastriano, but he is still oh so eager to embrace fake polling.
Mastriano, the Republican state senator from Franklin County who lost last year’s race for Pennsylvania governor by nearly 15 points, is now mulling a 2024 run for the U.S. Senate.
He tweeted on Tuesday afternoon what appeared to be a memo from Susquehanna Polling & Research that offered a “shocking turn of events,” claiming Mastriano was leading U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, a Scranton Democrat, 49.8% to 45% among likely voters.
Two problems there: Mastriano’s tweet was posted more than two hours after Susquehanna Polling denounced the memo as a fake on Twitter. And the Twitter user who originally posted the bogus memo had already apologized and deleted the tweet.
If this all rings familiar, that probably because Mastriano spent most of 2022 knocking as illegitimate any poll that showed him trailing Gov. Josh Shapiro by a significant margin.
Mastriano also touted any poll, no matter how dodgy, that showed him with an edge, or at least within striking distance.
Mastriano in August tweeted a poll, showing him with a 2.1% lead, issued by a Connecticut high school student who was testing if Republicans would promote surveys even if they seemed illegitimate.
Mastriano also tweeted that month a poll from a trio of North Carolina twenty-somethings with little experience in polling that showed him with a 3.5% lead. Those “pollsters,” after Mastriano’s loss, conceded they were “in over our heads.”
And Mastriano tweeted in December an alleged poll showing him with 4.4% lead over Casey. The problem there: The poll was dated as being conducted the week after it was posted on Twitter, giving rise to several jokes on Twitter about time-travel.
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