There’s a 100 Percent Chance These Polls Are Fake
All polls are imperfect. These were something else entirely.
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Over the past few months, an upstart political polling firm kept delivering good news for Democrats—and especially those on the left. Across more than a dozen surveys, it found progressives leading in key primary races and showed other Democrats in striking distance of winning traditionally Republican states. Except, it turns out, the surveys were fake. The deception, perpetrated by an organization called Wedgewood Polls, doubles as a cautionary tale about how people who follow politics should think about polls—not just fake polls, but also ones that are on the level.
What exactly happened here?
A data-journalism outlet called FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls this week with some troubling allegations: The firm, which claimed to have started conducting polls over the summer and didn’t list any employees on its website, appeared to have manipulated survey data to produce fake results. The details of the deception are a little in the weeds, but Wedgewood ultimately came clean. In a public statement on Tuesday, the firm described itself as a “fictional entity” that had deliberately published “fabricated numbers.” It then deleted its social media accounts and website.
Yikes. But why would someone want to fake poll results?
Video from Slate
Wedgewood claims it did so as part of “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” Yet Wedgewood also lied to media outlets that did ask probing questions about its methods, so that explanation is hard to take at face value. Money is one potential motive. Wedgewood appears to have charged clients to conduct surveys on their behalf, a standard practice for aboveboard polling firms that could in this case amount to fraud. We still aren’t 100 percent clear on who the people behind Wedgewood are, but they may have wanted to make money by manipulating betting markets on the races they claimed to survey. Wedgewood claims its deception “was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public,” but it may also have wanted to make certain Democrats look more electable—either to boost progressives or get Democrats to spend valuable resources in red states.
Did Wedgewood’s surveys affect those races?
Polls can influence who voters, donors, and party committees decide to support, and there’s some evidence that Wedgewood’s did. Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan Democrat whose U.S. Senate campaign flopped, says a Wedgewood survey showing her support cratering helped throttle donations and increased calls for her to drop out. “It killed us,” she wrote this week. On the other side of that coin is Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who nearly won the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor. Before her narrow loss, Hong referenced a since-deleted Wedgewood poll in a fundraising pitch to argue that her campaign had “momentum.” And as Politico reports, Democrats stepped up funding to Scott Colom, who’s running in deep-red Mississippi, after a Wedgewood poll last week showed him within 4 points of Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.
OK, but how much impact can one fake polling firm really have?
Actually, Wedgewood’s deception is part of a pattern. A group called Median Strategies also confessed to fabricating survey data earlier this year, similarly describing itself as a “social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem.” And on Thursday, FiftyPlusOne uncovered a third political polling firm that may have cooked some of its data. That firm, SoCal Strategies, has since deleted its website and social media accounts.
So does this mean political polls are just made up??
That’s going a step too far. It’s true that political polling has fallen on hard times. Americans are increasingly less likely to answer surveyors’ cold calls, making high-quality polls more expensive. Major polling misses in recent elections have also caused some universities, survey firms, and media outlets to abandon political polling entirely. But does that mean most polls are fake? Emphatically no. Legitimate pollsters strive to be transparent about who’s conducting them, who’s funding them, and the methods they use. They’re also among the people most upset about what Wedgewood did. “People like the idiots behind Wedgewood, and, to a lesser extent, Median, make it harder for the rest of us who are absolutely busting our butts to do good public opinion research,” the polling expert Natalie Jackson wrote on Substack today.
But if that’s true, does this Wedgewood incident really matter? What’s the bigger picture?
Unless you’re some kind of oracle, election outcomes are unknowable in advance. In that sea of uncertainty, it’s natural to grab onto any shred of data that seems to offer clues, and polls have become an outsize part of how many Americans think about politics. It’s also becoming more common for campaigns to blast out poll results—sometimes of questionable provenance—on social media or in fundraising emails.
Some of that is understandable. When it comes to predicting elections, polls remain much better than person-on-the-street interviews, lawn signs, or crowd sizes at rallies. But polls have always been imperfect, their accuracy subject to reaching a representative sample, assumptions about who will actually vote, and mathematical laws of probability. None of that justifies Wedgewood’s deception, and it’s a frustrating reality that the stakes of American politics have gotten higher even as the availability of high-quality polling data has declined. But the next time you see a polling result that seems too good to be true, just remember: As the cliché goes, the only poll that really matters is on Election Day.
OK, enough election talk for one day. Here are some recommendations for what to read, watch, and cook this evening that my colleagues are pretty confident won’t fall outside your margin of error:
Watch an impressive new movie: Wildwood, the new animated film from the studio that made Coraline, is a marvel. Slate film critic Dana Stevens raves, “It’s a dazzling exploration of the possibilities of stop-motion technology, as well as a classic coming-of-age fairy tale.”
Get hooked on some sports gossip: In the dog days of the NFL season, we need something to look forward to. Luckily, Luke Winkie has found a new fixation. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, football’s most iconic sportscaster duo, are allegedly feuding. “As a man who loves me some good petty drama,” Luke says, “I can’t wait for this story to unfold in the weeks ahead. Honestly, it outshines the actual football.”
Enjoy a funny (or scary) investigation: Some people find clowns delightful; others find them creepy. Why do they inspire such conflicting reactions? Decoder Ring cracks the case.
Prepare a humble yet decadent meal: If you’re feeling burned out, cooking an elaborate dinner can be too much work—and going out to eat might be too pricey. Luckily, there is a cheap, easy, and downright luxurious meal that you can make at home, whenever you want. Daniel Seifert reminds us of the comfort a simple soft-boiled egg can provide.
That’s all for today, folks! Till tomorrow.