Republicans are using some sketchy polling data to suggest Hunter Biden's laptop could have swayed the 2020 election to Donald Trump.
House Republicans have already started holding hearings to investigate President Joe Biden's son, and they cited a poll that claims a staggering 17 percent of Biden supporters would have switched their votes if they had known about his laptop. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler found their evidence lacking.
"Strikingly, when you go through the poll results, they show that even these aggressively framed questions would not have deterred the vast majority of Biden voters from casting their ballot for him," Kessler wrote. "Only a tiny percentage of voters surveyed — 4 percent of those unaware of the claim about an FBI investigation — said they would have switched from Biden to Trump. The survey gets a higher number, 16 percent, for the FBI question by including the results of those who said they would have voted for a third-party candidate or not cast a ballot for president at all."
The survey was conducted by the conservative Polling Company founded by Kellyanne Conway on behalf of the right-leaning Media Research Center. All of the lines tested were drawn directly from the Trump campaign's messaging.
"When you dig into the results, which are swayed by aggressively misleading questions, it shows that for all but a tiny percentage of Biden voters, the story would not have made a difference — even if framed as a still-unproven scandal," Kessler wrote.
"In any case, the questions in the poll are similar to messages the Trump campaign used in the final weeks of the campaign — and it still fell short," he concluded. "These lawmakers can claim they are simply quoting polls results — but it says less than they suggest and in many ways undermines their case."
