Fake polls aren’t always fake news.
For the second time this year, a new pollster has been caught flat-out fabricating political survey data.
In August, Median Strategies was exposed as bogus after claiming its published poll showed that socialist Francesca Hong had a 23-point lead in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin. She lost.
Now we learn that Wedgewood Polls, another new polling company that emerged this election cycle, was a complete fraud.
The company admits that just one of the 17 polls it published this year was real.
Only after the poll-analysis site FiftyPlusOne investigated and caught the fraud did Wedgewood claim that it was really running a prank or a sting.
It aimed, the “firm” said, to “test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?”
Good for FiftyPlusOne — but until then, the site had included Wedgewood’s polls in its election data.
So did The New York Times, Decision Desk HQ, Vote Hub, and the biggest name in the business, Nate Silver.
Wedgwood polls were cited on MS NOW and touted by Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom when its survey showed him tied in his US Senate race against Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
The fake polls have shown good news for both Democratic and Republican candidates, and sometimes for establishment Democrats such as Karen Bass against progressive challengers.
But overall they’ve favored Democrats, and have specifically boosted the electability of Democratic Socialists.
Silver’s model became a bit more favorable to Republicans after he removed the fake polls from his calculations.
Liberal columnist Bill Scher raised the alarm months ago about pollsters with sketchy histories helping Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
Now we’re hearing an I-told-you-so chorus from the camps of Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow, the two Democrats who lost to El-Sayed.
McMorrow had to drop out when plunging poll numbers — including a June Wedgewood poll that had her in single digits — cratered her fundraising.
On X, she blamed Wedgewood: “Donations dried up, volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do,” and “Reporters hounded me with calls to drop out.”
A McMorrow SuperPAC fundraiser said the poll “was used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”
Neera Tanden, a vocal Stevens supporter, added: “Man the pollsters that showed Haley behind over the summer were either made up or highly partisan. And a lot of smart people fell for the op.”
Gary Peters, the outgoing Democratic incumbent, worried aloud during the primary that misleading polls were distorting the outcome.
As it turned out, El-Sayed won by a much narrower margin than the polling had projected.
The last big fake-polls scandal broke in 2010, when a firm called Research 2000 published bogus surveys for progressive blog Daily Kos — and founder Markos Moulitsas sued the company for fraud.
Then as now, R2k’s fake polls shaped political reality in Democratic primary contests by showing progressive candidates to be electable in the general election.
In hotly contested primaries, electability is often a big issue: Hard-edged or scandal-tarred candidates such as El-Sayed, Hong and Platner need to persuade voters that nominating them isn’t a recipe for defeat in the fall.
Their opponents want to send the opposite message — recall the objections Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders faced in 2016.
This creates demand from all corners for polls on the electability question.
Now, as prediction markets mean big money riding on poll data, fake polls find an even larger audience.
Despite the scandals, we shouldn’t just ignore the polls.
When read with a properly skeptical eye, they have a good track record of showing what is electorally likely or possible.
They’re never going to be an exact science — and sometimes, even good pollsters just get one wrong.
Ann Selzer of the Des Moines Register, the dean of Iowa polling, retired after a way-off late 2024 poll predicted a Kamala Harris victory in the Hawkeye State.
Trump won Iowa by 13 points, then sued Selzer for fraud.
It was a ridiculous lawsuit, and was rightly thrown out of court.
But publishing polls that were never taken at all? That’s fraud.
A simpler lesson is for voters and reporters alike to demand that pollsters have a track record before we trust them.
There are plenty of known names in the business, from the granddaddy of them all (Gallup) to newspaper and university polls.
Some have been proven reliable; others have a known bias — but at least you know what you’re getting.
A brand-new pollster with no track record, no known institution behind it, and nobody checking its work? Voter beware.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review. X: @BaseballCrank