Fake polls fooled the political world. Now the midterms face a trust crisis

The political polling industry is under new fire after a second company on Tuesday acknowledged it had falsified data in a series of polls released over the past year.

The admission by Wedgewood Polls comes as Republicans question whether this year’s midterm polls are wrong and are undercounting GOP support.

Wedgewood’s polling had been used by a number of media firms, including The Hill, The New York Times and The Hill’s polling partner, Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).

DDHQ and other aggregators quickly removed the fake results from their averages, but the incident is adding more uncertainty to an industry already dealing with issues with public trust.

“This is a new threat to polling,” said G. Elliott Morris, the founder of the polling aggregation and political analysis site FiftyPlusOne. “The story of polling methodologically is one of constant innovation. Now we’re in the environment where I think the people consuming polls will have to have to innovate as well.”

The disclosure from Wedgewood on Tuesday evening that most of its results were fabricated sent ripples throughout the polling industry and among political observers.

Wedgewood said in a statement posted on the social platform X that its endeavor was an “experiment” designed to test if a fake polling firm could gain traction and be taken seriously without much scrutiny in political discourse.

“Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public; it was designed as a wake-up call,” the post reads. “If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations, the standards for how polling data is vetted, aggregated, and reported must change.”

But critics are pointing to real-world consequences of the fake results, which covered a wide range of Senate races from Michigan to Maine.

One such poll from Wedgewood released in June of the Michigan Democratic primary showed Abdul El-Sayed leading with 46 percent, followed by Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) with 39 percent. It was among a few early polls to show state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D) bottoming out in the race, only receiving 9 percent support.

Following a few other polls that showed McMorrow well behind, she dropped out of the race.

McMorrow pointed to the poll result as a major factor in her donations drying up, and calls for her to exit the race.

Jennifer Holdsworth, who ran a super PAC supporting McMorrow, said in a post on X that the result was used by several donors as reason to pull back funding at a time when McMorrow supporters were being significantly outspent.

Several of Wedgewood’s fake results seemed to have at least somewhat favored Democrats. They generally weren’t total outliers compared to the findings of legitimate pollsters but added to a narrative of Democrats being in a strong position.

One showed Maine Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson leading Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) by 4 points. Another showed El-Sayed leading former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) in a general election poll by 6 points, more than most other pollsters have found.

In another fake result that if true would have been eye-opening, Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) only led Democrat Scott Colom by 4 points — a race deemed a significant longshot for Democrats even if a blue wave is on the horizon.

This isn’t the first time this year that fake results have been put out that received widespread attention. Another fake firm called Median Strategies disclosed in August that it put out two poll results, in the Wisconsin Democratic Senate primary and the Los Angeles mayor’s race, that were falsified.

The source of those polls was identified by The Guardian as Rahil Prakash, a 21-year-old recent college graduate who similarly told the outlet he wanted to put out the fake polling as part of a social experiment.

Who exactly is behind the Wedgewood results is unclear.

Efforts from The Hill to reach Wedgewood for additional comment were unsuccessful. An email to the address listed on its X account bounced back as undelivered, and its website is no longer operational. Its X account also requires a code to be input to message them on the platform.

Although Wedgewood announced itself that its polls were faked, an investigation from Morris’s FiftyPlusOne seems to have prompted the disclosure.

Morris and others who work at the site said in a blog post that they received an anonymous tip last week with evidence suggesting Wedgewood might be faking its data. After running an investigation and preparing an article exposing Wedgewood, FiftyPlusOne reached out for comment.

Wedgewood then went forward with its statement and messaged FiftyPlusOne to say “f— you,” the post states.

Morris told The Hill that this compounds the issue of declining public trust already facing legitimate pollsters who are genuinely trying their best to produce accurate results.

This incident came at a time when Republicans have been casting doubts on the polls as they have mostly shown Democrats poised for major gains on Election Day. They were quick to seize on Wedgewood’s disclosure that polling can’t be trusted.

“Left-wing outlets are just as culpable for platforming fake polls as the Democratic operatives who fabricated them. Abdul El-Sayed and Troy Jackson may have fooled the press during their primaries, but their radical, tax-hiking agendas won’t fool voters this November,” said Bernadette Breslin, the national press secretary for Senate Republicans’ campaign arm.

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr put out a post on X warning journalists and broadcasters against “amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics.” He said there has been a “significant surge in entirely fake polls.”

“The FCC takes these issues seriously. Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes,” he said.

Morris and other experts said this creates a distorted picture when the overwhelming majority of poll results have been legitimate. They reiterated that methods exist to try to decipher what can be trusted and what should be viewed with greater skepticism.

Ben Leff, the CEO and co-founder of the polling firm Verasight, noted that the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) maintains accreditation standards for pollsters who meet minimum standards on key aspects of their process, including a clear and transparent methodology statement explaining how they gathered their data.

“You wouldn’t go to a doctor who wasn’t licensed or a lawyer who didn’t pass the bar, and media organizations should hold pollsters to the same standard,” he said.

Leff said checking if a pollster has the AAPOR certification is a good first step.

Still, the difficulty remains that even a methodology statement can be fabricated, as happened in the case of Wedgewood.

“I’ll be honest. Unfortunately, at some point, you can’t catch everything, right?” said Zach Donnini, the head of data science for the polling aggregator VoteHub. “Just because at any moment, someone can just decide to burn your reputation and start releasing fake polls, potentially even for nefarious financial initiatives.”

Donnini had been in touch with Wedgewood as well to try to probe their legitimacy. He said the difficulty was that Wedgewood had names tied to it who formerly worked for SoCal Strategies, which is a legitimate polling firm.

“It’s not like this is random people from nowhere. They actually conducted real polls before,” he said.

Leff said explaining that the fake polls are not at all connected to the polling industry is critical but may be difficult.

“Where the public is going to have to be really careful is on social media and online, because news networks are only a small portion of what people consume, and so it is going to be on the public to look at when they read results online that reference polls and making sure those seem like legitimate entities.”