Here’s a name I haven’t thought about in a couple of years, and happily so: Ann Selzer.

Selzer, you’ll recall, was the longtime once-respectable pollster for the Des Moines Register whose career went down in flames amid the fallout from a horribly skewed 11th-hour 2024 presidential poll that showed Donald Trump trailing Kamala Harris 47-44 in the Hawkeye State.

For context, a June Register poll showed Trump up by four over Harris. And for even more context, Trump ultimately ended up winning Iowa... by 13 points.

Selzer’s poll, however grotesque, was neither clever nor original. In fact, she was something of an electioneering piker. Recall that just four years earlier, an infamous Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Basement Joe Biden leading Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin just days before the election.

The result in Wisconsin? Biden did indeed beat Trump… by half a point. Mission accomplished.

Both the Selzer poll and the WaPo/ABC News poll were exactly what desperate Democrats wanted because they knew the legacy media would broadcast the findings far and wide, generating last-minute excitement among Democrats and last-minute gloom among Republicans, spurring turnout among the former and stifling it among the latter.

In short, these polls were manipulative pieces of pollaganda, a self-descriptive term that our Mark Alexander introduced some 18 years ago.

Clearly, the Democrats and their pollagandizing fellow travelers are undeterred, as evidenced by the 2026 version of their polling psyop — this one courtesy of The New York Times and Siena University. In this poll, which focuses on this cycle’s key Senate races, Democrats lead in Michigan by 11, in Texas by seven, in Maine by six, and in both Ohio and Kansas by five.

So the Times wants you to believe that Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed — a guy whose family has ties to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization called the Muslim Brotherhood; a guy who just two days ago on “60 Minutes” put conditions on Israel’s very right to exist; a guy whose vile response to the attempted mass murder by a Muslim terrorist of Jewish children at a suburban Detroit day school was, “Hurt people hurt people”; a guy who vows to live his life in the “Sharia compliant” way — is leading Republican Mike Rogers by 11 points?

Either an overwhelming majority of Michigan’s 7.4 million voters are sleepwalking through recent European history, or the Times should be made to register under Section 527 of the IRS code as a super PAC.

Indeed, The New York Times isn’t so much a news organization as it is a political action committee, or even a pressure group. So when you think of the Times, you should think of it in the same terms as you think of CAIR or NARAL or Black Lives Matter or Code Pink or the Human Rights Campaign or the Democrat Party. The Times, like all those other organizations, has an agenda, and that agenda isn’t first and foremost to report the news. Its agenda is to shape the news.

This stuff would be laughable were it not so infuriating — and so potentially destructive to the welfare of our nation. Why, it’s almost as if the legacy media is taking turns each election cycle. Just watch: In the waning hours of the 2028 presidential cycle, either CBS News or NBC News will take one in the neck for the team and publish a ridiculously biased poll that harms their particular brand but helps their collective cause.

“Democrats Show Strength in Final Days of Race for the Senate, New Polls Find.” That’s the headline from the Times. But buried within the poll is this encouraging nugget: “There are still some undecided voters, and voters who decided only in the last month favored Republicans by a nine-point margin.” Translation: The Democrats are limping to the finish line.

“My gut tells me,” said Fox News elder statesman Brit Hume on Sunday night, “that this is gonna be a big blue night.” Hume continued, “I think everybody agrees that the House is gone to the Democrats. That’s a virtual certainty. The Senate obviously is in play. ... I think at the moment the Republicans have every reason to be worried about losing both the House and the Senate and creating a very, very difficult next two years for this president as he serves out his term.”

As author and columnist Conrad Black has noted, though, Donald Trump’s list of achievements is rather spectacular. And this despite the most vicious and unrelenting headwinds:

The tiresome and predictable criticism of a pro-Trump bias will come, as it always does when anyone tries to say anything positive about the president, but let me respond with two points. Firstly, one can dislike Trump and still recognize the accomplishments are real and laudable. If personal dislike for the president prevents someone from seeing that, the real bias problem is with them. Secondly, when 92 percent of media coverage on the president is anti-Trump, balance does not come from repeating what is already deafeningly amplified. It comes from stating the parts that are generally ignored.

If this doesn’t cause folks to wonder why they’re considering a vote to punish Trump, I don’t know what will.

If you’ve read this far, you’re already a committed conservative, already a committed voter. You don’t need convincing. So this column is written for your friend or neighbor — that person whom you suspect is right-leaning and maybe just needs a last-second nudge to get out to the polls today. This is your chance to be a force multiplier, even if it’s only a force of 1+1.

And finally, if your neighbor isn’t duly persuaded, ask him if he finds it strange that the Democrats are the party that Hamas is rooting for; and the Islamic Republic of Iran; and those student rioters all across France; and our nation’s number one geopolitical foe, Communist China; and the Mexican and South American drug cartels; and the open-borders folks; and the transgender cult that wants to normalize the spectacle of men competing against women in sports.

All of these vile forces are arrayed against the Republican Party today. All of them have a rooting interest in the Democrat Party. Let’s not let them have the last word.

Everyone votes. No excuses. Thank you.