I have made quite clear my longtime personal and professional affection for Elizabeth Warren and for her husband, Bruce Mann. (Quiz him about the early American judiciary. I dare yez!) If that’s all you need to know, then you needn’t read any further.

On Tuesday night, Senator Professor Warren was the victim of one of the the most egregious offenses ever committed by a major news organization. In conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, the fine hand of which I suspect was involved in what follows, NBC News released its latest polling data. The general overall numbers were pretty much as expected, except Bernie Sanders’s lead had grown. Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and SPW were in a virtual dead-heat for second. National polling in a primary campaign can be dismissed as largely irrelevant, but the railbirds among political journalists make a big deal out of them, so we talk about them like they really mean something. However, it was elsewhere in the polling where the real malignant mischief was done.

The poll also asked respondents for their preferences in head-to-head matches with the president*, and head-to-head matches with each other. (This latter seemed hinky in a multi-player field but, what the hell, For Amusement Purposes Only, as the parlay cards used to say.) Mark Murray, NBC’s political majordomo, tweeted out the results on Wednesday afternoon. I read them, up and down, about four times before I had convinced myself of the astonishing fact that SPW, ranked in a statistical tie for second in NBC’s own national poll, did not even appear in these one-on-one surveys. Joe Biden, who has finished out of the money everywhere he’s run, and who is in the middle of his third consecutive landfill of a presidential campaign, was included. Amy Klobuchar was included. SPW was nowhere to be found.

The NBC News poll’s treatment of Warren may be unprecedented. Caroline Brehman Getty Images

This came after her campaign had spent a weekend trying to get people interested in the fact that SPW had been disappeared from the coverage of the primary campaign, especially in the week between Iowa and New Hampshire. Her campaign was so insistent that a backlash to the backlash was starting to build, The New York Times cast rather a gimlet eye on the phenomenon. But it’s hard to argue that the phenomenon is real in the face of what NBC did.

For a while, I thought maybe the whole thing was just some weird tabulation glitch, or that what had been tweeted out was incomplete. But the poll was run by Peter Hart, and he’s been polling presidential races since god was a boy. I think he polled Taylor-Cass. It would be unlike him to make this monumental an error. It turns out I was right, as we all learned, thanks to the indefatigable Molly Hensley-Clancy from BuzzFeed, who got ahold of Hart. The pollster was very forthcoming.

The poll, from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, found Warren was effectively tied for second place nationally, with 14% of the vote. But pollsters excluded her from a series of match-ups between Trump and top candidates. The poll include Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg, who all polled within a point of Warren, and Amy Klobuchar, who trailed significantly behind them. Peter Hart, whose firm conducted the poll, told BuzzFeed News that the poll had “space and time” for just five candidate match-ups.

In other words, they didn’t include SPW because they didn’t want to. In other words, this poll and its subsequent publication make up a staggering act of deliberate journalistic malpractice, and anyone who continues to cite it needs to be demoted to night rewrite for a spell. And it is interesting to note that neither of the two news organizations behind the poll chose to comment on the BuzzFeed story. Sometimes, my business really sucks pondwater. (Lawrence O’Donnell refused to use the poll on his MSNBC show Tuesday night specifically because of SPW’s exclusion. Fair play to him for that.) Of course, SPW has dedicated her entire public career to fighting against the distortions in our lives and our politics by the people for whom the WSJ serves the same function as The Daily Racing Form, So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

A top-tier candidate...did not merit a mention. Caroline Brehman Getty Images

One of the more interesting reactions to this legendary cock-up has come from the people who supported Kamala Harris. See, they say, this is what we were talking about. But what happened to Harris wasn’t a lack of coverage. It was bad coverage—distortions of her record from the right and the left, whisper campaigns about her personal life, inexcusable tut-tutting from the Civility Police when she dared call Biden to account for his sorry history on busing. (We can argue about whether or not SPW could have done more to back up her fellow senator, but that’s another discussion.) That was the kind of thing used against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 and against Al Gore in 2000. It is no less unfair, but it is different from what we see here. SPW is simply being ignored. I have been around this racket for going on 40 years, and I have never seen a purportedly neutral poll that left out a top-tier candidate simply because it wanted to. That’s a whole new thing, at least for me.

You know what I wish? I wish that the entire Democratic primary campaign could’ve come down to Warren, Harris, and Klobuchar. Three brilliant, accomplished, formidable women, all of whom generally share progressive goals, but with just enough differences on how to accomplish them to lend some real spice to the debate, and three women who, I guarantee you, would agree to fight ferociously for whichever one of them happened to win. My preferred outcome: President Warren, Attorney General Harris, and Senate Majority Leader Klobuchar. You can mix them up according to your personal preferences. Those are the kind of people we need to clean up this mess.

God, I wish no men were running for president.

Oh, yeah. And then this happened.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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