This week on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove argued that the Ted Cruz campaign may indeed have won Iowa by spreading and overselling a false report by CNN that Ben Carson appeared to be suspending his campaign.

There are two questions here. One, did Cruz campaign staffers knowingly mislead caucus voters? More on that below. Two, did CNN’s widely circulated false report cause Senator Cruz to win Iowa? Some polling data that has been widely overlooked suggests the answer is almost certainly no.

“At 7:00 p.m., the Cruz campaign — Spence Rogers — sends out a tweet,” Rove said. “And the tweet is headlined, ‘Press says that Carson is going to take a break’ and then it says he’s going home, and he has a big announcement later this week, so tell all the Carson people to caucus with the Cruz people.” Rove said the message was sent to nearly 1,500 precinct captains. His point: If the precinct captains were able to use that information to gain just a few votes per precinct, that would close the gap of  6,239 votes between Cruz and Trump.

However, an NBC|Survey Monkey online poll for the week of December 28 to January 3 suggests that Trump and Cruz would each have collected about the same percentage of any Carson voters abandoning ship. The poll found that 26% of Carson supporters named Cruz as their second choice, and 26% named Trump as their second choice. So, according to the poll, even if many Carson supporters did switch away from Carson at the last minute, Cruz and Trump would have benefited equally.

For the sake of argument, imagine that for some reason Cruz snagged not 26% of the Carson switchers but doubled the poll’s finding and snagged fully 50% of them, while Trump’s gains tracked with the NBC poll, snagging a fourth of the Carson voters. If so, then for every 1,000 Carson voters switching away from Carson, Cruz would have gained 500 votes, and Trump 250. Notice that in this scenario Cruz only gains 250 votes on Trump for every 1000 Carson switchers, since Trump is also grabbing Carson supporters.

Here’s the kicker, even on this improbably rosy scenario in which Cruz gets twice the percentage of Carson supporters as the NBC poll suggested he would receive, fully 25,000 Carson voters would have had to abandon Carson and go looking for another candidate in order to tilt the winner from Trump to Cruz.

How unlikely is it that 25,000 Carson supporters abandoned ship at the last minute? First, it hasn’t been confirmed that even 100 caucus goers switched their votes away from Carson due to the false report. Second, Carson ultimately received 9.3 percent of the vote in Iowa. He had been averaging 7.7 percent in the last week of polling. If he had been on track to receive an additional 25,000 votes before the false report, then he would have more than doubled his final vote total, pulling in almost 23 percent of the total GOP vote.

In other words, some three in five Carson voters would have had to abandon Carson at the last minute due to the false report, a report that the Carson campaign corrected within an hour or so of its first appearing and well before caucus-goers voted.

The NBC|Survey Monkey online polling results, moreover, confirm some conventional wisdom. Trump, like Carson, isn’t a career politician. The anti-establishment sentiment is strong this year. If Carson drops out, many of his supporters may insist on switching to Trump even if they aren’t fond of his brash, combative style and preferred the kinder, gentler Carson. The NBC|Survey Monkey online poll suggests that about 1/4th of Carson supporters would make that move if Carson drops out; about 1/4th would go to Cruz, and the remainder would either not vote or go to other candidates, such as Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.

Willful Deception?

Now, the other question: Did the Cruz campaign knowingly mislead?

Cruz’s team defended the message above, saying they’d heard from CNN that Carson was dropping out. CNN reported the matter from their studios and  politics reporter Chris Moody also tweeted out the rumor. However Moody corrected it at 5:43 p.m.

A little over an hour later, the Carson campaign tweeted that he was still in the race, explaining that he was simply going home to get some fresh clothing. Yet Rove pointed out, “At 8:20 [7:20 Iowa time], the national co-chairman of the [Cruz] campaign, Steve King, sends out a tweet saying, ‘It looks like Carson is getting out of the race.’ Now, they knew at this point that this was inaccurate.”

King apparently should have known better at this point, but whether he did or not is conjecture. At the very least, the Tweet involved a failure to properly fact check before sending out the message.

Two voice mails also have surfaced, in which Cruz campaign workers are apparently calling precincts to urge a switch from Carson to Cruz. The first one, Breitbart reports, was sent at 7:07 p.m from a Galveston, Texas phone number:

[inaudible]…from the Ted Cruz campaign, calling to get to a precinct captain, and it has just been announced that Ben Carson is taking a leave of absence from the campaign trail, so it is very important that you tell any Ben Carson voters that for tonight, uh, that they not waste a vote on Ben Carson, and vote for Ted Cruz. He is taking a leave of absence from his campaign. All right? Thank you. Bye.

And the second, “left at 7:29 p.m. from an Iowa phone number,” traces to a Cruz campaign volunteer hotline:

Hello, this is the Cruz campaign with breaking news: Dr. Ben Carson will be [garbled] suspending campaigning following tonight’s caucuses. Please inform any Carson caucus goers of this news and urge them to caucus for Ted instead. Thank you. Good night.

Willful deception or the proverbial fog of war? Breitbart has a helpful timeline showing that at least some members of the Cruz campaign continued to propagate the false report after they should have known better. Cruz has apologized to Carson for the incident, and specifically for his campaign not calling precincts to correct the false report once they were aware it was false.

Trump is calling for the state of Iowa to disqualify Cruz. Others are calling for Cruz to fire guilty campaign staffers, which Cruz is thus far refusing to do, saying he’s not going to scapegoat campaign workers for passing on a media report in the heat of the moment. Bill O’Reilly directed his anger at CNN, but also said that Cruz should take disciplinary action against the staffers responsible.