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Donald Trump relies on an unlikely outlet to back up his claim that he is the rightful winner of the US presidential election: the Sunday Express.
The outgoing president tweeted on Sunday that “Britain’s best pollster wrote this morning that this was clearly a stolen election,” citing a claim made on Fox News by former Republican politician Newt Gingrich.
Trump’s statement that the “best pollster in Britain” backed his claims of poll fraud puzzled many in the UK polling industry as they tried to find out which company claimed the election had been stolen.
In fact, it appears that the original source of the claim was a column written in the UK Sunday Express by Patrick Basham, a Washington DC-based individual who heads the Democracy Institute’s relatively obscure think tank.
Basham has spent 2020 publishing US election polls alongside the Sunday Express, claiming to have a unique approach that “only looks at people who identify themselves as likely voters rather than simply registering to vote” with the goal of identify timid Trump voters.
The result is that the Sunday Express, largely unnoticed in the UK, has gained a substantial online audience in the US as a result of publishing polls showing substantial clues for Trump.
These articles were very popular with the president’s supporters, generating a large number of clicks to the Express website. On occasion, the president himself tweeted links to Express articles featuring the polls, with the final headline reading “Poll: Donald Trump Ready to Win the Presidency of the United States by Crush in the Electoral College.”
On Sunday, Basham rejected claims that his poll had been incorrect in another article for the Sunday Express, saying that his poll predicting a landslide Trump victory “practically nailed” the election. He blamed the “mountain of evidence, direct and circumstantial, of widespread voter fraud” for the declared results that did not resemble the landslide Trump victory his poll had predicted.
Basham said: “I wrote last Sunday that, if our projection of the popular vote for Biden deviated by a couple of points, it would reflect electoral fraud rather than missing a landslide from Biden. My words were prophetic. “
The Sunday Express column appears to have been read by Gingrich, who summarized it in a Fox News discussion, at which point it appears to have reached Trump and his Twitter account.
Although the Sunday Express appears to have underperformed the bottom line, few polling companies had a particularly successful election. Many top pollsters predicted a much bigger lead to Joe Biden than what happened, prompting another round of soul-searching on whether the industry can improve its accuracy.
