A polling firm whose surveys were reproduced by prominent media outlets, including Newsweek, has said that its results were fabricated and that the deception was a social experiment to expose weaknesses in the industry.
Wedgewood Polls made the statement on October 20 after researchers at election analysis website FiftyPlusOne confronted it with evidence that its underlying data was fake.
Wedgewood Polls said that the operation was intended to establish how easily a fictitious polling company could obtain recognition from polling aggregators and media outlets.
“The short answer: Far too easy,” it said in a statement on X. Newsweek has contacted Wedgewood Polls for comment.
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Newsweek has retracted three articles and corrected others. Other publications that reproduced Wedgewood surveys included The Hill, Breitbart, The Daily Beast, and the Washington Examiner.
The results were also included in prominent polling databases, including those maintained by The New York Times, Nate Silver, VoteHub, and FiftyPlusOne, before the firm was exposed by FiftyPlusOne. Decision Desk HQ said it had removed 17 Wedgewood polls from its race-level polling lists and averages.
Wedgewood emerged in June 2026, presenting itself as a new independent polling organization. One early survey covered Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary and showed John Fleming leading Julia Letlow by 4 percentage points. Letlow defeated Fleming by almost 14 points on June 27.
Questions about the firm’s credibility were raised within weeks. On July 10, Washington Monthly columnist Bill Scher said that Wedgewood had only recently entered the polling industry and that its first survey had been badly wrong.
A more detailed investigation followed on August 20, when Straight Arrow News examined Wedgewood’s background.
Its investigation said that the firm’s website, hosted on Google Sites, listed no staff names, telephone number or location. Its X account had been created in June, and the website was registered on June 26.
Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster at a different firm, told Straight Arrow News that he communicated with someone at Wedgewood. Carlson said the person told him the two-person firm includes one progressive and one conservative. It declined to identify its operators publicly or participate in a video interview, according to Straight Arrow News, saying one member had previously experienced online harassment.
The Times was already listing Wedgewood’s results by then, with a disclaimer that said: “This pollster does not meet our criteria for selected pollsters.”
The investigation that finally exposed Wedgewood was conducted by FiftyPlusOne researchers Mary Radcliffe, G. Elliott Morris and Cooper Burton.
FiftyPlusOne said it had received several warnings about the firm’s credibility, but a tip in October provided evidence that prompted it to examine the underlying survey records. The researchers obtained Wedgewood’s raw data for its Mississippi Senate survey, which the company said had been conducted using Pollfish, an online survey platform.
FiftyPlusOne said it identified discrepancies in the electronic markers in the data, checked with Pollfish, and compared Wedgewood’s records with data from another polling firm.
On October 20, FiftyPlusOne confronted Wedgewood with its findings and requested an explanation. Rather than answer the questions, it said, the firm issued its admission on X.
Wedgewood described it as an experimental project to demonstrate vulnerabilities in the polling industry. It said that the vast majority of its releases had not been supported by genuine survey data, though that one survey, covering Nebraska’s Senate race and financed through crowdfunding, had been genuine. Wedgewood added that its success illustrated a failure of scrutiny by news organizations and polling aggregators.
Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow, who suspended her Democratic Senate campaign on July 5, described the damage she believes fabricated polling caused.
McMorrow said on X that a Wedgewood survey published in late June showed her support collapsing into single digits, which she said contributed to donations drying up, volunteers becoming demotivated and reporters asking if she would withdraw.
The controversy comes amid increasing scrutiny of polling methodologies and accuracy. In a response published on October 20, Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman praised the FiftyPlusOne researchers for exposing the deception.
Gelman, who has long criticized excessive dependence on election horse-race polling, argued that the proliferation of surveys and the media’s appetite for numerical political narratives reinforced one another. He also questioned the timing of Wedgewood’s explanation, saying that its account of an experiment emerged precisely when the fabrication was exposed.