Fake Surveys and Big Misses: Pollsters Face Challenges in 2026

When a virtually unknown polling shop called Median Strategies revealed last week that it had fabricated surveys in Wisconsin and Los Angeles as a “short-term social experiment,” the news sparked a mixture of anger and fingerpointing among the political pollster community.

Some public opinion researchers placed the blame on media outlets and poll trackers who had failed to vet the phony surveys. Others have discussed, both publicly and privately, what the episode means for the polling industry’s broader credibility, especially after back-to-back polling misses in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary and the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin.

At any rate, the polling business is at a crossroads; reputable pollsters are facing declining response rates, the rise of online prediction markets has created new incentives for low-quality or even fake polls and there’s more pressure than ever to produce survey results quickly. 

“We’ve all been scammed before,” Michael Cohen, a longtime pollster who has published a book on the evolution of modern campaigns, said of the Median Strategies fiasco. “The pollsters got scammed, the media got scammed. But I’m not as concerned about the scam as I am about the fundamental challenges of polling.”

Political polling has been one of the key drivers of campaign decision-making for nearly a century. It influences how candidates spend money, offers guidance to fundraisers and can shape perceptions of campaigns and candidates. 

And of course, questionable polls are nothing new in the political world. Campaigns have long touted dubious surveys as a way to shape media coverage of their races or motivate donors. What makes the Median Strategies debacle so game-changing, according to Cohen, is that the polls that claimed to conduct never actually existed. In fact, the entire firm itself was a sham.

“Part of the conversation has been: ‘Oh my god, this is now in the blood stream.How do we handle this?’ ” Cohen said.

But there are other challenges. Live phone polls, long considered the gold standard of public opinion polling, have become more expensive and more challenging as fewer Americans are willing to answer their phones for an unfamiliar caller asking them to share their political opinions.

At the same time, the increased pace of campaigning and the 24-hour news cycle have put more pressure on pollsters to produce results. In some cases, pollsters may take responses from the easiest-to-reach respondents rather than continue trying to contact individuals who may be less inclined to answer survey questions.

“People really used to love answering the phone and talking about polling,” one Democratic pollster, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the industry, said. “That’s just not the case anymore, and we’re trying to keep up. But unfortunately that’s also going to make it more likely that you miss something.”

When pollsters miss big, the Democratic pollster said, it reinforces the public’s skepticism in the reliability of the industry.

“If you look at a poll and then you look at how a race actually ends up and the results are very different, I think a lot of voters see that and think to themselves: ‘well, these pollsters are clearly doing something wrong. I don’t want to participate in this,’ ” the person said.

Another longtime Republican pollster, however, shrugged off concerns about the polling business. For at least the past decade, he said, there’s been hand-wringing about polling misses. “It happens, but you just keep putting the data together and learning.”

To be sure, the polling industry isn’t going anywhere. New pollsters – some reputable and some not-so reputable – are continuing to enter the industry each election cycle. Some firms and organizations are innovating in the field, introducing news methods and technologies that legacy pollsters may not be quick to adopt.

Polling also is no longer the be-all and end-all of campaign data, Cohen said, recalling how when he got started in the business in the mid-1990s, “polling was the only data you had.”

“Now, we have a lot of different information. We have social media information, we have consumer information,” he said. “The challenge in a campaign is assimilating that all together and coming up with a story. Polling is a part of that, especially early in the campaign when you’re trying to understand how people are feeling. But it’s not the only piece of data that’s important.”