‘It’s Misinformation’: Another Fake Pollster Riles the Political World

For months, survey data from an upstart company called Wedgewood Polls was picked up by some of the country’s most prominent polling aggregators, from The New York Times to the Silver Bulletin, the election analysis Substack run by data guru Nate Silver.

The data, which covered some of the most-closely watched contests of the year, rippled across the political social media landscape, as timely polling tends to do. The only problem: The data – or at least the vast majority of it – was fake.

On Tuesday, after the polling and analysis website FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood about the authenticity of their data and apparent discrepancies in the numbers, the company posted a statement on X admitting that almost all of its data was falsified as part of what it called an “experimental project.”

“We wanted 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 scrutiny exists in media and public commentary?” the statement reads. “The short answer: Far too easy.”

What exactly the people behind Wedgewood Polls hoped to achieve with that so-called experiment, however, remains unclear. An email to an account previously associated with the company bounced back as undeliverable, and Wedgewood’s X account was deleted shortly after revealing that its data was fabricated.

(Wedgewood claimed in its statement that it conducted “one fully legitimate, crowdfunded” poll in Nebraska.)

The revelation marked the second time this year that a purported polling outfit copped to falsifying survey data. Earlier this year, a company called Medium Strategies acknowledged that it had fabricated polling data in high-profile races, including the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary and the Los Angeles mayoral primary, setting off a furor among polling professionals.

Like Wedgewood, Median Strategies claimed that the fake poll numbers were distributed as part of a “social experiment.” But unlike Median Strategies, whose numbers were largely excluded from the most well-known polling aggregators, Wedgewood’s efforts appear to have involved quite a bit of work and industry know-how.

FiftyPlusOne, for example, reached out to Wedgewood shortly after the company first appeared in June to inquire about the outfit’s background and methodology. Wedgewood replied with an email identifying its leadership, detailing its startup capital and future plans.

Likewise, in an editor’s note published this week, The New York Times said that it reached out to Wedgewood to confirm its validity before it ever included the company’s data in its polling aggregates. Wedgewood, according to the Times, “answered a series of questions regarding the identities of the pollsters; the methods they were using to draw their sample, contact respondents and weight their polls; and the source of their funding.”

Even on its now-deleted X account, Wedgewood sought to appear legitimate, publicizing its email address and soliciting sponsorships for its alleged polls. Zachary Donnini, the head of data science at polling aggregator PollHub, said that he actually donated his own money to help fund Wedgewood’s Nebraska poll out of a desire to support young, upstart pollsters.

In its statement acknowledging that it had shared fake polling data, Wedgewood said that it “never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public.” Yet the so-called “experiment” allegedly had some real-world effects.

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who ran for the Democratic nomination for Michigan governor before dropping out ahead of the primary, said that after Wedgewood published a poll in late June showing her support tanking into single digits, her fundraising “dried up” and she began receiving calls from reporters about exiting the race.

“Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken,” McMorrow wrote on X. “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.”

Polling aggregators, including the Times, FiftyPlusOne and the Silver Bulletin, have removed Wedgewood’s polls from their databases.

While Wedgewood’s data did little to actually influence polling averages and election forecasts, the episode strikes at an already-sore spot for polling professionals, who are already rankled by recent instances of deception and malpractice. In addition to the Median Strategies debacle this summer, another small firm in Florida copped to changing the stated vote choices of certain respondents to better fit the pollster’s “read of the race.” Another firm that did not name its pollsters, SoCal Strategies, went dark this week after an inquiry from The Washington Post.

One Democratic pollster, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the business, decried the fake polling episodes as a “slap in the face to the entire industry.” Public skepticism of polling isn’t new, the pollster said, but there needs to be a level of “trust” between opinion researchers, the media and the public.

“These bogus firms are undermining trust and making our jobs harder and your jobs harder,” the pollster said. “Let’s be clear: these are ‘social experiments’ or whatever they’re calling them. It’s misinformation.”

The American Association for Public Opinion Research condemned Wedgewood for faking its polling data, calling it a “serious breach of ethics” that “undermines legitimate polling and public opinion work.”

“As we have emphasized previously, professional polling organizations are transparent, ethical, and work hard to provide critical information to the public and other stakeholders,” said AAPOR President Mary Losch. “It is important that we don’t conflate fraudulent activity like this with legitimate election polling.”

This story has been updated with comment from the American Assocation for Public Opinion Researchers.