Trump touts fake right-wing polls to make himself feel better
Way back in the early 2000s, when Daily Kos was but a wee baby, web polls were a big deal. These are polls on a website where anyone can vote—and often however many times they want to. In other words, they have zero credibility. And back in the day, right-wing sites, particularly Free Republic, would list all the web polls on AOL, MSN, and other now-diminished or -defunct websites, and urge their readers to go vote so they could all pretend their side had won. It was called “Freeping.”
By 2004, the Daily Kos community got in on the action, like with this diary, and we got better than the right at freeping. It wasn’t long before they quit the practice, since it was no fun sending their readers to an online poll we had already “won.” The idea of freeping was lost to the times, a silly artifact that no one missed because no one actually cared about those web polls.
Until Donald Trump last night, that is.