Donald Trump is relying on an unlikely media outlet to back his claim that he is the legitimate winner of the US presidential election: the Sunday Express.
The outgoing president tweeted on Sunday that the “best pollster in Britain wrote this morning that this was clearly a stolen election”, quoting a claim made on Fox News by former Republican politician Newt Gingrich.
Trump’s statement that the “best pollster in Britain” was backing his claims of ballot fraud baffled many people in the UK polling industry, as they attempted to work out which company was claiming that the election had been stolen.
In reality, it appears the original source of the claim was a column written in the UK’s Sunday Express by Patrick Basham, a Washington DC-based individual who runs the relatively obscure Democracy Institute thinktank.
....Where it mattered, they stole what they had to steal. @newtgingrich
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2020
Basham has spent 2020 publishing US election polling in conjunction with the Sunday Express, claiming to have a unique approach that “only looks at people identifying as likely voters instead of just registered to vote” with the aim of identifying shy Trump voters.
The result is that the Sunday Express has – largely unnoticed in the UK – gained a substantial online audience in the US as a result of publishing polling showing substantial leads for Trump.
These articles proved massively popular with the president’s supporters, driving a large number of clicks towards the Express website. On occasion, the president himself would tweet out links to Express articles featuring the polling, with the final headline reading “Poll: Donald Trump set to win US presidency by electoral college landslide.”
On Sunday, Basham rejected the claims his polling had been wrong in another article for the Sunday Express saying his polling predicting a Trump landslide “pretty much nailed” the election. He blamed the “mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread ballot fraud” for declared results that did not resemble the Trump landslide his polling had predicted.
Basham said: “I wrote last Sunday that, should our Biden popular vote projection be off by a couple of points, it would reflect voter fraud rather than our having missed a Biden landslide. My words were prescient.”
The Sunday Express column then appears to have been read by Gingrich, who summarised it on a Fox News discussion, at which point it then appears to have found its way to Trump and his Twitter feed.
Although the Sunday Express appears to have been substantially off on the final result, few polling companies had a particularly successful election. Many mainstream pollsters predicted a much larger lead for Joe Biden than occurred, prompting yet another round of soul-searching about whether the industry can improve its accuracy.
