Pollsters routinely miss the mark, but some pollsters aren't even trying to hit the target.
Just months after a polling outfit that gave Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) a false sense of momentum was exposed as a fraud — or as they put it, a "short-term social experiment" — another pollster has been outed as a phony.
'Don’t fall for it.'
On Tuesday, the election forecasting website FiftyPlusOne confronted Wedgewood Polls — which claimed on its now-deleted website to be "a nonpartisan, online-panel survey research firm covering competitive U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races nationwide" — with evidence that it had been fabricating data.
The fake pollster immediately dropped the mask, first issuing a statement on social media claiming that it was "an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry," then reportedly replying to FiftyPlusOne researchers' request for comment with "f**k you."
In its public statement, the fake pollster admitted that there was "no real data behind the vast majority of our releases" and boasted that "our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms — including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS NOW."
In its coverage earlier this month, MS NOW featured a Wedgewood Poll showing Democrat Jocelyn Benson with a 10-point lead over Republican John James in the Michigan gubernatorial race, reported Mediaite. Blaze News' Poll Watch currently has Benson with a lead of 6.7 points.
"The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation," said the fake pollster, which claimed that only one of its many surveys was legitimate.
Wedgewood Polls has been turning out bogus data for months — data that have been shared by numerous publications and poll aggregators, including Decision Desk HQ, the Economist, FiftyPlusOne, Poliwave, the New York Times, 270toWin, and VoteHub.
VoteHub, for instance, included data from Wedgewood Polls in a weekly polling rundown on July 29 showing Abdul El-Sayed leading Haley Stevens in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary 46%-39%. The false polling data about Stevens evidently prickled Neera Tanden, the former director of the Biden White House Domestic Policy Council, who expressed disappointment on Tuesday that "a lot of smart people fell for the op."
The New York Times acknowledged on Wednesday that its poll tracker "included 15 polls released by Wedgewood between June and October, some of which included multiple races."
Decision Desk HQ included at least 17 of Wedgewood's phony polls on its race-level polling lists and averages.
While Decision Desk HQ claimed that removing the polls has "not changed the projected seat totals or chamber control probabilities in the Senate or House," the removal has for other outlets proven consequential.
When the Economist removed Wedgewood's polls from its model, their results shifted in "a handful of races." For example, "Democrats' win probability in the Mississippi Senate race fell from 7.1% to 5.5%," said the Economist.
BlazeTV host Steve Deace wrote, "Keep this in mind regarding the Wedgewood fake polling scam. Way back in June, Wedgewood missed the winner of the Louisiana Republican Senate primary by 18 points. 18. points. And yet months later, elite corporate media kept promoting their fake polls anyway."
Republican Rep. Julia Letlow beat state Treasurer John Fleming 56.9% to 43.1% in the Louisiana Senate primary runoff in June. Wedgewood released a poll on June 25 showing Fleming leading Letlow 51%-47%.
Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh (Ariz.) said of the revelation about the fake pollster, "Everything is fake! Smile and touch grass — enjoy reality and enjoy the show!"
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts noted, "This is the second left-wing polling psy-op exposed during this election cycle. There is a coordinated effort to demoralize conservative voters and keep them away from the polls. Don’t fall for it. Your ballot is the only poll that ultimately matters. Go vote."
Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who ran for U.S. Senate and unofficially withdrew from the Aug. 4 Democratic primary after trailing in distant third place to El-Sayed and Stevens, attributes some of the blame for the death of her campaign on a fake Wedgewood poll. She claimed Tuesday night that the late June poll showing her with only 9% adversely impacted donations and volunteer morale and prompted calls for her to drop out of the race.
"Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken," wrote McMorrow. "But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in — for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down."
"If this teaches us anything — DON'T GET COMPLACENT AND DON'T TRUST THE POLLS," added McMorrow.
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