In a closed-door meeting at the Justice Department last month, senior officials with the Office of Professional Responsibility spent two hours reviewing 78 PowerPoint slides relating to — of all things — Watergate.

The presentation focused on longstanding allegations of misconduct by the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the team of young Ivy League lawyers whose investigation helped bring down President Richard Nixon and secured criminal convictions of his top former aides.

After The Wall Street Journal broke news of the session this month, Nick Akerman, one of the task force’s few surviving staff lawyers, denounced the presentation in an essay titled “I Helped Investigate Watergate. The D.O.J.’s Attempt to Reframe Nixon as the Victim Is Extremely Dangerous.” Mr. Akerman dismissed the presenter — a graduate, like him, of Harvard Law School — as the peddler of a “bonkers conspiracy theory” asserting that Mr. Nixon was ousted in a “plot.”

The Journal’s headline — “Decades After Watergate, Justice Department Reviews Whether Nixon Got a Raw Deal” — fueled skepticism by suggesting that Mr. Nixon, long assigned the role of irredeemable historical villain, might have been treated unfairly.

Mr. Nixon, of course, got a great deal: pardoned a month after his resignation for all crimes he committed or may have committed during his presidency. He went on to publish best-selling books, serve his successors as consigliere and travel the world as an elder statesman.

But what about all the president’s men? Did they get a raw deal?

According to a raft of scholarly work, the answer, unequivocally, is yes. By fabricating witness testimony, suppressing exculpatory evidence and colluding with the presiding judge, the Watergate prosecutors railroaded the former attorney general John Mitchell, the former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and the former domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. This does not mean these convicted officials were innocent. But it does mean they did not receive the due process that even the men around Mr. Nixon deserved.

Mr. Akerman and others suggested that the Justice Department officials convened the meeting because they hoped, indirectly, to exculpate President Trump. If the Watergate prosecutions could be exposed as corrupt, the argument goes, then so, too, could the investigation led by Robert Mueller that looked into possible ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

This misses the point. The role of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, itself a post-Watergate creation, is to review any information that suggests a department employee might have violated the law, regulations or standards of conduct.

With its political animus and early use of computers, the Watergate investigation is indeed the grandfather of lawfare. One of the jurors who pronounced judgment on Mr. Nixon’s cabinet officials described Watergate as “war between the ins and the outs.”

A case in point, omitted from the recent presentation: On Feb. 6, 1974, a task force staff lawyer, Peter Rient, sent a colleague a three-page memo titled “Material Discrepancies Between the Senate Select Committee Testimony of John Dean and the Tapes of Dean’s Meetings With the President.”

Mr. Nixon was then six months away from resigning. Mr. Dean was the young White House counsel who admitted to having managed the Watergate cover-up until, fired by Mr. Nixon, he negotiated partial immunity from the Senate Watergate committee and cooperated with the prosecutors. In exchange for leniency, Mr. Dean gave damning testimony against the president and his men.

The existence of Mr. Nixon’s secret taping system was publicly disclosed 17 days after Mr. Dean concluded his televised Senate testimony. The remaining year of Mr. Nixon’s presidency was spent litigating access to his tapes. When their contents tumbled out, the press, the courts and scholars all concluded the recordings vindicated Mr. Dean’s proclaimed “astounding memory for detail.” With his brown comb-over and owlish eyeglasses, the ex-wunderkind became, in Walter Cronkite’s words, “an all-purpose Watergate witness.”

The Rient memo was never released to the news media. The public was kept in the dark about acute problems that Watergate prosecutors had identified in the Senate testimony of their star witness.

Likewise, the Rient memo was withheld from defense counsel in U.S. v. Mitchell, the Watergate cover-up trial in which Mr. Dean’s testimony proved decisive. Having ironed out all the material discrepancies from his sworn Senate appearance, the prosecutors used Mr. Dean’s new testimony to secure convictions of Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman, once among the most powerful men in government.

A material discrepancy, in criminal procedure, means it is significant enough to affect the outcome of a case. Criminal convictions routinely get overturned after disclosure of prosecutorial misconduct less egregious than this. Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman, now dead, all served prison terms.

The Rient memo remained undisclosed until 1997, when I revealed its contents in National Review. Also disclosed in that article was a memo by the Watergate prosecutor George Frampton dated July 22, 1974 — 10 weeks before jury selection in the Watergate cover-up trial began — outlining “significant discrepancies between Dean’s anticipated trial testimony” and “that of other government witnesses or evidence.”

Mr. Frampton’s analysis showed that one meeting Mr. Dean testified to “apparently didn’t take place.” The prosecutor advised, “We probably would do well simply to omit Dean’s testimony about this.” Mr. Dean later acknowledged the discrepancies, testifying that he and the prosecutors cleaned them up before the Mitchell trial.

The Frampton memo showed that the prosecutors’ concerns extended beyond the problems that the Nixon tapes posed for their star witness. Like the Rient memo, the Frampton memo was hidden from the news media and the defense counsel in U.S. v. Mitchell.

As the Watergate prosecutors must have known, withholding these memorandums trampled the constitutional rights of their prosecutorial targets. Had lawyers for Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman had access to these analyses, they could have used them for cross-examination and probably demolished what little credibility the disbarred Mr. Dean still possessed.

It was Geoff Shepard, a veteran of Mr. Nixon’s defense team and a leading Watergate scholar, who delivered last month’s briefing. In 2013, Mr. Shepard published an article in The Atlantic that made use of previously unpublished task force memorandums to chronicle how prosecutors repeatedly met privately with Judge John Sirica, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. He had presided over the Watergate break-in trial and was determined to sit as well on Mr. Mitchell’s trial. No defense lawyers were included in these meetings — a major violation of federal criminal procedure.

Judge Sirica had a problem: Approaching 70, he would soon be forced, under rules then in place, to resign as chief judge, surrendering his power to assign cases. Mr. Shepard found memos by Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor whose work helped secure the convictions in the Mitchell case, showing he had allowed Judge Sirica to orchestrate the contents and timing of the indictments so he could assign the case to himself.

Mr. Shepard’s findings shocked the bar. At a 2015 panel event at George Washington University Law School, the law professor Stephen Saltzburg, a former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall and one of the nation’s most renowned experts on criminal procedure, declared that the prosecutors’ concealment of exculpatory information in the Mitchell case and the conduct of Judge Sirica constituted “as gross misconduct as you could possibly get.”

If the Trump Justice Department officials demonstrate the courage to revisit the Nixon years, whose mythologies remain foundational to mainstream media and elite academia, they can expunge the tainted convictions secured during Watergate.

Their chief problem could be whether the rogue Watergate prosecutors are covered by the Office of Professional Responsibility. Certainly, Judge Sirica was not; any official review of his misconduct must occur elsewhere. And there is good reason to question whether the Watergate task force was ever part of the Justice Department. In 1974, Antonin Scalia, an assistant attorney general at the time, complained in writing that “the special prosecutor’s briefs are not reviewed in the department” and therefore the Justice Department would not endorse “the positions adopted by the special prosecutor.”

These are technicalities. Official review of the crooked convictions in Watergate is rooted in a wealth of newly declassified evidence and is long overdue. One need not be a supporter of Mr. Trump — or of any other target in the various investigations he has faced — to agree with Santayana’s maxim that those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

By NY Times – https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/opinion/watergate-nixon-trump.html

A Shanghai kindergarten named for the grandfather of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao has been used by a United Front Work Department arm to cultivate ties with Chao and her family. Chao has returned to the school for decades and met with Chinese Communist Party and United Front officials there, according to translations of Chinese government and state-media reports.

The kindergarten has held military-themed events for young children that included toy rifles and games supervised in some cases by People’s Liberation Army personnel. Chao’s father donated to the school in 1995.

Chao has been rumored to have ties to Chinese communist for years, and this report seems to indicate that where there is smoke, there is indeed fire. McConnell is leaving the Senate after decades in leadership, a shell of his former self. He looked the other way as China gained influence as he and his wife no doubt took advantage of special favors for their complicity.

The record is not a single meeting; it is a multi-decade relationship centered on a school that stages military activities for toddlers to worship China’s godless communist system. This will be McConnell’s legacy. He will be remembered among those who sold out his country to a foreign power. He will be fortunate to bow out gracefully before he can truly be held accountable for his actions.

On June 28th, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was a surprise witness in the January 6th committee hearings. Although heavily hyped as a “surprise witness” with startling “new information” much of what Cassidy said was both eagerly reported as “fact” by the mainstream media and just as quickly debunked by more objective news organizations.

I won’t recount here how quickly disproved Cassidy’s second-hand claim that President Trump, irate that his Secret Service detail would not take him to the Capitol, sought to grab the wheel of his Presidential Limousine and assaulted a Secret Service Agent. Even NBC News reported that Secret Service Officials are prepared to testify under oath that neither of these things happened.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney induced Hutchinson to say it was her “understanding” that “President Trump instructed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to call Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn on the evening of January 5th” and that it was Hutchinson’s “understanding” that these calls were completed on the evening of January 5th.

Cheney would later speculate that the purpose of these calls on January 5th was “to find out what was going to happen on January 6th. Once again USA Today, would report this falsehood without any effort to confirm its accuracy.

Rolling Stone, USA Today, MSNBC, Yahoo News, Miami-Herald, and others almost immediately reported Hutchinson’s claim as if it were a fact. If any of these “news outlets” had bothered to call for comment, they would have learned that Hutchinson’s claim was unequivocally false; I received no such call from Mark Meadows on January 5th. In fact, although I met him once in the green room at FOX in 2019 when he was still a Congressman, I have never spoken to him by phone or in person on any other occasion.

General Flynn tells me that he didn’t speak to Mark Meadows on January 5th and neither has he ever had any phone conversation with Meadows. To their credit, ABC News was the only media outlet to request a comment on Hutchinson’s baseless claims and accurately report my denial.

Hutchinson went on to say that Meadows wanted to attend a “briefing in a war room set up in the Willard Hotel.” Hutchinson said that Meadows was persuaded not to attend this briefing in person but that he participated in the briefing “with Roger Stone and General Flynn” by phone.

Here’s how NPR reported it:

Once again, there never was any such telephone briefing. That of course did not stop USA Today or the New York Times from gleefully recycling this canard without contacting me or my attorney for comment. Nor was I aware of or involved with any “war room” within the Willard Hotel.

In fact, the Washington Post has reported accurately that “The Willard attracted many pro-Trump figures around that time, including “Stop the Steal” provocateur Roger Stone. Stone was not part of the Giuliani team at the Willard and did not participate in the team’s efforts, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.”

I continue to believe that the “Stop the Steal” effort to bring public attention to the anomalies and irregularities as well as very real evidence of fraud in the results of the 2020 election, constitutes an act of Constitutionally protected free speech and that the legally permitted and peaceful events on January 5th and 6th are Constitutionally protected under the 4th amendment. At no time did I, Ali Alexander, or Alex Jones publicly or privately advocate violence or lawlessness. There has been a concerted effort by the Democrats and their allies in the fake news media to insist otherwise.

It is sad that I must reiterate it, but any assertion, claim, or even implication that I was aware in advance of, involved in, or condoned any illegal activity at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th or any other date is categorically false. Nor was I involved in any legal effort to delay the certification of the results of the electoral college. There is no witness, email, text message, encrypted message, or individual that proves otherwise. Unfortunately, since this assertion is never reported by the fake news media, false claims about my actions on January 5th and 6th are constantly recycled, including today by the Miami-Herald.

The favored tactic of the left, in this case, is “guilt by association.” Because the off-duty D.C. police officers who had provided paid security for me and my family during my January 2020 Trial in Washington D.C. were unavailable; the Oath Keepers organization provided security for me on January 5th. I do know individual members of the Proud Boys. I am a 41-year friend and supporter of President Donald Trump. None of these facts proves anything whatsoever.

Hutchinson’s Cheney-induced assertions about me were the source of a tsunami-like wave of hatred and vilification on Twitter. This exposes the true purpose of the baseless attacks on me; to associate me falsely with actions I was not involved in and had no involvement in, to drive up the cost of lawyers that I require to defend myself, and to drag my name through the mud one more time. Sadly, I am the Trump Supporter that woke leftists love most to hate.

Of course Congresswoman Liz Cheney suborned Hutchinson’s perjury, coaching her to lie and should also be prosecuted but then she has a auto-pen signed pardon from Joe Biden.

He now says he was pressured and coerced by prosecutors. But despite repeated claims to the contrary, Cohen still insists that the testimony he gave against Donald Trump was truthful.

There is an old rule in politics: words matter. There is an even older rule in a courtroom: sworn words matter even more.

That distinction is essential in understanding what seems to be the extraordinary reconciliation between President Donald Trump and his former personal attorney Michael Cohen — and the increasingly widespread claim that Cohen has now “recanted” the testimony he gave against Trump.

He has not.

Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to this question. Charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s thugs and pressured to give false testimony against President Trump in return for leniency in sentencing for the contrived process crimes I had been convicted for in a DC Soviet style show trial, I refused.

Michael Cohen chose a different path He told Trump’s persecutors what they wanted to hear.

President Trump has understandably seized upon Cohen’s alleged about-face regarding the prosecutors who pursued him. In January, Cohen accused the offices of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James of pressuring him to provide testimony useful to their cases against Trump. Cohen wrote that he “felt pressured and coerced” to provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to convict Trump.

I’m not sure President Trump understands that Michael Cohen has not recanted or withdrawn any of his testimony against Trump in the so-called hush money case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. But saying “I felt pressured and coerced” is not the same thing as saying “my testimony was false.”

Cohen himself has gone out of his way to make precisely that distinction.

When Cohen appeared with Dan Abrams on SiriusXM and was directly asked whether his allegations of prosecutorial pressure meant his previous testimony was untruthful, Cohen answered unequivocally: “No, to the exact contrary.” He then said that nothing about his allegations of pressure should suggest that the information he provided was anything other than “truthful and accurate”

There is simply no intellectually honest way to describe that as a recantation. A recantation means taking back a previous statement. It means saying, in substance: What I told you before under oath was not true.

Cohen has not done that. In fact, he has specifically done the opposite.

This distinction became glaring during Cohen’s remarkable August reunion with President Trump on WABC. Trump repeatedly praised Cohen for supposedly recanting his testimony. “You took it back,” Trump told him, adding, “I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t, to be honest.” Cohen did not correct the President. That’s because he has taken nothing back. He said nothing.

That silence undoubtedly helped create the impression that Cohen had withdrawn his allegations against Trump. But silence is not a recantation.

And when Cohen was subsequently confronted directly with the question, he stood behind his sworn testimony. The New York Times, got this narrow but important factual point right: Cohen “has not taken any of it back.”

This presents a rather obvious contradiction that neither Cohen nor many of those celebrating his supposed recantation appear anxious to address. If prosecutors pressured Cohen to provide testimony designed to secure a conviction against Donald Trump, what exactly did Cohen say because of that pressure that was untrue?

Name it. Which statement? Which allegation? Which material fact? What part of his sworn testimony does Michael Cohen now withdraw?

Thus far, the answer is: none of it.

Cohen testified for Bragg in the Manhattan criminal prosecution that ultimately resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He also testified in Attorney General James’s civil fraud case. His testimony was not incidental to either proceeding, although it was also not the only evidence presented against Trump.

Those were not television interviews. They were not podcasts. They were not Substack posts. They were sworn testimony in legal proceedings.

Cohen now says the prosecutors behind those cases were politically motivated and that he felt pressured and coerced by them. Yet he simultaneously maintains that what he told the courts was truthful and accurate. Both statements can theoretically be true. A witness can believe prosecutors exerted enormous pressure upon him while still maintaining that the testimony he ultimately gave was truthful.

But if that is Cohen’s position, then it is not a recantation.

The distinction is particularly important because Cohen himself appears acutely aware of it. When CNN’s Jake Tapper characterized Cohen as saying he had been “pressured and coerced” into testifying against Trump, Cohen corrected him. The comment, Cohen explained, was that he “felt pressured and coerced.” Cohen then added: “And I think the distinction is extremely important.”

Indeed it is.

Cohen is an attorney. He knows the difference between alleging prosecutorial pressure and admitting that sworn testimony was false. He also knows the potential consequences of admitting that testimony he gave under oath was knowingly false.Perhaps Cohen understands that to recant his sworn testimony now could open him to new State charge of perjury. Perhaps those encouraging Cohen to recant his sworn testimony understand they could face charges of obstruction if Cohen was given anything in return for his new claims.

This is not to minimize what Cohen has said. His accusations against Bragg and James are extraordinary precisely because he was one of the government’s most important cooperating witnesses. According to Cohen, prosecutors approached their investigations determined to build cases against Trump and pressured him to provide information useful to those cases. Those allegations deserve scrutiny on their own merits.

But they should not be embellished into something Cohen himself refuses to say.

There is another fascinating dimension to all of this. Michael Cohen spent years attacking Donald Trump in the most viciously personal terms imaginable. He wrote two anti-Trump books. He became a fixture in the anti-Trump media. He testified against his former boss. According to the Times, Cohen sought a pardon from President Joe Biden and, after failing to obtain one, subsequently resubmitted his pardon application with Trump’s name in Biden’s place.

Criticism of Alvin Bragg is not recantation. Criticism of Letitia James is not recantation. Saying prosecutors pressured you is not recantation. Calling the system politically weaponized is not recantation. Even seeking a presidential pardon is not recantation.

Taking back your sworn testimony is recantation.

Michael Cohen has conspicuously refused to do that.

Perhaps Cohen will someday say explicitly that material testimony he gave against Donald Trump was false. If he does, that will be major news, and it will raise profound questions about the prosecutions themselves as well as Cohen’s own conduct under oath.

But he hasn’t said it yet.

Instead, when finally asked the question directly, Cohen said exactly the opposite: the information he provided was “truthful and accurate.” President Trump has claimed that Cohen “fully RECANTED his testimony.” But the first half of that proposition is contradicted by Cohen’s own public statements. And it raises the question that Cohen has still declined to answer:

What, specifically, did Michael Cohen testify to about Donald Trump that was not true?

But there has not been a recantation.

Vice President JD Vance announced on Thursday that the Labor Department is suspending Microsoft from PERM, the process companies use to sponsor H-1B workers for green cards, accusing it of abusing the system more than any other employer. The suspension also covers Adobe and the outsourcers Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini. At the same briefing, he said nine universities will be investigated for allegedly using J-1 visas to undercut American graduate students and researchers: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT, Just the News reported.

PERM is the Labor Department’s check before a company can sponsor a foreign worker for a green card. The company has to show it looked for an American worker and offered the usual wage for the job. Passing that check is not the green card. The application still goes to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which decides whether the worker can stay for good.

At a briefing Thursday, Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the department will not accept new applications from the suspended companies and will not process pending ones, Reutersreported. Existing H-1B visas stay valid. Asked how long the suspension would last, Vance said it will “last as long as it needs to.” The action was an administrative suspension announced by the Labor Secretary, not a published executive order.

Vance said, “We decided to suspend the PERM program for Microsoft, which means they will no longer be able to take those H-1Bs and apply for permanent resident status within the United States of America.” “Our message to Microsoft is: You’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

He called the recruitment test fraudulent. “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said, the Associated Press reported. The recruitment step he described is a real, long-criticized feature of PERM. He offered the small-town newspaper example. It is not a finding that these companies did it.

No fraud finding has been issued. “The fraud is that they’re making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal.” “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” he said. Sonderling said Microsoft and Adobe were suspended because of multiple active federal investigations, and he also named Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini.

Vance tied the charge to last year’s layoffs. He said Microsoft cut 6,000 American workers while drawing 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. “For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with 1½ foreign indentured servants,” he said, according to Fox Business. Those figures and the indentured-servant framing are his assertions, not a department finding. He called it a scandalous system and said foreign workers were being used like indentured servants to undercut American wages.

Sonderling said that since 2009 the named companies had requested almost 3 million foreign workers, received more than 230,000 H-1B approvals, and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications. “That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs that were taken from American workers,” he said.

Vance urged Congress to rewrite the program and said the administration would use the tools it already has in the meantime.

The suspension follows a September 2025 proclamation that imposed a one-time $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions for workers hired from abroad, and Project Firewall, the Labor Department enforcement drive Reuters said has opened about 200 cases. The fee is not being collected. On June 8, 2026, U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin in Boston set aside the agency actions that imposed it. On July 24, the First Circuit declined to pause that ruling while the administration’s appeal continues.

On the universities, Vance said the nine are employing J-1 visas for federally funded grants at a rate of about 61 percent, against a national average of 38 percent. “Something weird is going on at these universities.” That comparison is his assertion.

Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas had already been served and investigations were underway. “Nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building,” he said.

The suspension left existing H-1B visas in place. It stops the named companies from filing new PERM applications and stops the department from processing pending ones until it is lifted. The administration says it is committed to keeping that suspension in place as long as it needs to, and to using the tools it already has while it waits on Congress.

The Albany Times Union, conceivably the most biased newspaper in the country, wants North Country New York voters to believe a Democrat is about to flip New York’s 21st Congressional District currently held by Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

Their evidence is a Siena Research Institute survey, released October 9, that has Democrat Blake Gendebien leading Republican Anthony Constantino 46 to 42, with independent Christopher Schmidt at 5 and 8 percent undecided. Read the ballot Siena actually tested, and the sample underneath it, and the lead dissolves. This is not a measurement of the election on November 3. It is a measurement of an election that will not be held. Schmidt is a write-in candidate not on the ballot!

The certified November ballot in NY-21 has two names: Anthony Constantino and Blake Gendebien. Schmidt failed to qualify for a line. A federal judge dismissed his challenge to the state’s signature requirement in August, and he is running as a write-in. Siena read his name to respondents anyway and parked 5 percent of the vote with him. There is another liberal write-in in the race who was not named. This is the second media poll of the contest to test a ballot that does not exist. A survey that invents a candidate, then treats his supporters as if they had somewhere to go on Election Day, is not polling the race. It is diluting it. 

The Sienna Institute conduct of this poll is both unprofessional and methodologically flawed and they know it

The rest of the sample does not describe this district. Elise Stefanik, who carried NY-21 62 to 38 and whose favorable rating in district polling has run between 56 and 62, comes in at roughly 50 percent favorable in Siena’s numbers, 50–44 in the published release. Bruce Blakeman republican candidate for Governorleads Democrat incumbentKathy Hochul by 15 points. Hochul lost this district by 23 points in 2022, and every poll the Constantino campaign has taken here has Blakeman ahead by 20 or more. President Trump is at 52 percent unfavorable in a district he carried by double digits. A survey can be internally consistent and still be wrong about the place it claims to represent. When the anchors of the district — the outgoing congresswoman, the president, the top of the ticket — all come in softer than the election returns and the other available polling, the congressional horse race sitting on top of those numbers is not credible.

The refusals make it worse. In any serious poll, refusals are not folded into the result as if they were evenly distributed non-answers. Here, 10 percent of Republicans and 9 percent of independents refused to answer, against 2 percent of Democrats. That imbalance does not stay in a footnote. It changes the weighted distribution of the sample. Siena’s own crosstabs already show Gendebien consolidating Democrats at 85–10 while Constantino is held to 65–21 among Republicans. Strip out a phantom write-in and a lopsided refusal rate, and the four-point Democratic lead is a rounding error inside a margin of error of 4.6 points on 496 likely voters interviewed from September 30 to October 6.

Follow the money, which does not lie the way a ballot test can. If NY-21 were actually a four-point race a month out, national Democrats would be spending as if it were. They are not. Gendebien reported roughly $500,000 in the bank on October 1, a poor number this late, and a candidate who has lost cash on hand over the past year while carrying a heavy bill load. His campaign is on television and little else. Constantino’s side is taking the rest of the advertising and tying Gendebien to Hochul. On fundraising calls, Gendebien’s own callers have been telling donors he has been losing ground and is down in the campaign’s latest internal poll. Campaigns do not beg that way when their private numbers match the public ones.

Siena has been here before. Its October 2020 poll of the old NY-22, taken September 27 to October 4 among 383 likely voters, had Anthony Brindisi leading Claudia Tenney 48 to 39. It was the only public poll of the race. Tenney won. The institute’s statewide record is no better. A pollster that misses a congressional race by nine points in the same media market does not get the benefit of the doubt when it misses the ballot, the refusals, and the fundamentals in the district next door.

None of this means the race is over, or that Constantino can ignore turnout in a midterm. It means the survey the Albany and Plattsburgh press is treating as a snapshot of NY-21 does not describe the election voters will cast. Two names are on the ballot. The district still prefers Republicans for Congress, 50 to 45 even in this sample, and prefers the Republican for governor by 15. Anthony Constantino is winning the race that exists. Siena polled a different one.