Another fake polling scandal has hit less than two weeks before the midterm elections, ripping open old wounds about the Michigan Democratic Senate primary and renewing skepticism about pollsters as they increasingly forecast a blue wave on Nov. 3.
An outfit called Wedgewood Polls released a statement on social media Tuesday acknowledging most of its results were not legitimate, but rather some kind of experiment designed to show serious problems with how polls are conducted and then reported on by the media.
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“The polling industry needs major reform,” the Wedgewood Polls account declared, before describing itself as “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.”
“Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source.”
“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.” The organization claims it conducted one real poll in Nebraska.
Former Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow promptly said her campaign was a victim of bogus polling. “As one of the candidates featured in these polls — the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) – here’s the impact of this ‘experiment,’” the Democratic Michigan state senator wrote on X.
McMorrow went on to say that her donations dried up, her “devastated” volunteers panicked, and the media bombarded her with calls to drop out of the race, which she did on July 5.
Wedgewood Polls numbers were also used to demonstrate that progressive Abdul el Sayed polled the best against the then-likely Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, while McMorrow performed the worst. This was crucial because many Democrats were making an electability argument against el Sayed at the time.
The Democratic establishment then circled the wagons around Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), but she lost the primary to el Sayed — albeit by a much smaller margin than the polls predicted. This led to a lot of criticism of polls conducted for el Sayed backers. El Sayed had previously claimed a poll showing him behind Stevens was paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
“Absolutely locking in that Mike Rogers needs to lose in 2 weeks, but man the pollsters that showed Haley behind over the summer were either made up or highly partisan,” the influential liberal Neera Tanden, who had been a Stevens supporter, wrote on X on Tuesday. “And a lot of smart people fell for the op.”
“Campaigns try to get polls that are favorable to them and put them out … get polls of questionable accuracy, but if they look good for you, get them to have media folks pick them up and report them in order to try to create like a bandwagon effect, which is a technique as old as politics itself,” retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), also a Stevens supporter, complained at the time. “We saw polls that were questionable right from the start for me.”
“Sure, a point was proven,” McMorrow continued. “Polling is broken. 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.”
McMorrow, like Tanden, reiterated that she was supporting el Sayed over Rogers. But if Democrats lose one of the most closely contested Senate races in the country during what is supposed to be a favorable year, in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1994, it will raise new questions about whether McMorrow would have been better positioned to unite Democrats ahead of a general election.
El Sayed is up by less than 3 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average at a time when Democrats are leading or within striking distance in much redder states, such as Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Ohio.
This isn’t the first time an actual fake polling scandal has happened this year. A company released polls in what it similarly described as a social experiment, with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass circulating one that showed her ahead in her reelection race.
“All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data,” the company said in its press release. “Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
Another pollster admitted it had used unconventional methods to increase its numbers for James Fishback, the distant third-place finisher in the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary won by Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL). Fishback was a client, and this was one of the few polls showing him running competitively. He received 10.5% of the vote, running nearly 15 points behind runner-up Lt. Gov. Jay Collins (R-FL).
Many questions remain about the reliability of legitimate polling ahead of the Nov. 3 elections. Momentum appears to be building toward a Democratic takeover of the House, and a large volume of high-quality polling shows the public dissatisfied with the economy and disapproving of President Donald Trump’s performance in office, two key metrics that favor Democrats. The party that controls the White House has lost House seats in all but two midterm elections since 1938.
But the Senate races are close enough that even a minor polling error could drastically alter the picture of which party is favored to win control. And polls have misfired in some recent races. Republicans, including Trump, have speculated that the polls, often conducted by the media or universities, are meant to demoralize them.
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Now some Democrats agree. “If this teaches us anything – DON’T GET COMPLACENT AND DON’T TRUST THE POLLS,” McMorrow posted.
“How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media commentary?” Wedgewood Polls asked. “The short answer: Far too easy.”