Wall Street Journal poll has Biden trailing. No one reports Trump's top pollster conducts it.

Tony Fabrizio is co-executor of WSJ poll. He's also the top strategist for MAGA Inc., Trump's super PAC, and is now heading to work for Trump's campaign as a senior adviser.

“New Poll Shows Biden Trailing Trump in Battleground States,” blared the headline in The New York Times yesterday, in a piece written by the Times’ polling guru Nate Cohn.

He was reporting on a Wall Street Journal poll—rather dubiously, polls are now news stories in and of themselves, even for other news organizations—showing Donald Trump with a lead over President Biden in six battleground states, from Michigan and Pennsylvania to Nevada and Arizona.

And so the urgent polling news story went—blowing up on websites and TV screens this week, as Politico, CNN, Fox, Reuters, The Hill, and many other news organizations amplified it.

The Signorile Report is reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism. Thanks!

What none of them reported, however, is that the co-executor of the Wall Street Journal Poll has been simultaneously working as a top strategist and pollster at a Trump super PAC, MAGA, Inc., and was reported in the same week to now be headed to the Trump campaign itself as a senior adviser. Tony Fabrizio, in fact, has a long history with Trump, having served as his top pollster and strategist in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

Having a top Trump strategist who is currently getting paid to raise money for and help elect Trump conduct the WSJ poll would seem to run counter to the WSJ’s attempt—and that of the other news organizations reporting on the poll—to implicitly portray the poll as independent and unbiased.

The WSJ would counter that the WSJ Poll is conducted by Fabrizio, whose firm is Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, along with Democratic pollster Michael Bocian, founder of the Democratic polling firm GBAO, who is the other co-executor of the WSJ poll.

But Bocian, who worked on the campaigns of Senators Raphael Warnock and John Fetterman in 2022 as well as campaigns of other Democrats, isn’t currently working on the Biden campaign or for a Biden super PAC, certainly not according to his firm’s list of clients.

And Fabrizio even gives interviews about the WSJ polling speaking as a member of Team Trump—something we don’t see other pollsters for news organizations doing—using the collective “we” when describing what he sees as Trump’s strengths and Biden’s weaknesses.

Here he is being interviewed on the WSJ’s “Free Expression” podcast shortly after Super Tuesday, where, incidentally, he was described as a “former Trump pollster,” with no mention of his current work at MAGA Inc., at all:

So, it's going to be very difficult for them to reframe all this. And the notion that they're going to educate voters about Donald Trump is silly on the face of it. Now, can things change? Sure. Voters tend to rally around the president that's in office if there is a national crisis. Things could change in terms where there is a surge in the economy or something changes with the border crisis or something like that. But at this juncture they have an uphill battle, they are on defense, we are on offense.

While a small handful of sites (not the New York Times or CNN) note the WSJ poll was conducted by “Republican” pollster Fabrizio and “Democratic” pollster Bocian, none identify Fabrizio as a top adviser of MAGA Inc., now headed to the Trump campaign itself, an operative who is a hardcore, vocal Trump supporter who literally said this week in a statement about his joining the Trump campaign: “I’m honored that the president and his team have asked me to continue in the fight to Make America Great Again.”

Again, this poll received enormous coverage this week—because that’s what happens now when major news organizations conduct polls—and while there’s no apparent evidence of bias (and I’m not a polling expert, so can’t speak to that) it’s pretty creepy that no one mentioned a MAGA zealot was at the helm. Perception, after all, is everything, and that’s why news organizations often feel compelled to offer a “full disclosure” on stories.

And it certainly raises eyebrows when you look, for example, at the poll results in Pennsylvania. The WSJ poll, which was conducted from March 17th to 24th, has Trump beating Biden by three points. But the respected Pennsylvania Franklin and Marshall College poll conducted March 20th–31st has Biden beating Trump by a whopping 10 points.

Yet, the Pennsylvania state poll showing Biden leading by 10 is getting far less coverage—certainly not amplified by The New York Times—than the Wall Street Journal poll, which got wall-to-wall coverage.

Corporate media is always whining about how people don’t trust polls nor media itself—and their polling analysts often then go out of their way to make a case for polling accuracy—but they don’t seem to see how they only add to the negative perception of polling, as well as to the continued distrust of the media in general.