For the second time in as many months, a fraudulent entity claiming to be a polling operation has been outed for releasing fictitious numbers in hotly contested midterm election campaigns.
The first episode involved an obscure outfit calling itself “Median Strategies,” which claimed that its August poll showed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass with a double-digit lead over challenger Nithya Raman. There was no such survey. It was a sham carried out by a 21-year-old recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash. He briefly copped to the scam, then disappeared without revealing where he lived, who he really was, and what he hoped to gain.
This week, a much more ambitious con job came to light. “Wedgewood Polling” admitted it was a bogus operation hours before it was about to be exposed. Its proprietors promptly claimed (as did Rahil Prakash) that it was all a social science experiment designed to alert gullible news organizations, news consumers, and polling aggregators to the dangers out there.
“The polling industry needs major reform,” Wedgewood posted on X. “Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverifiable, low-quality methodology. 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 scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?”
The statement continued: “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.”
Well, not everyone treated Wedgewood as legit. RealClearPolitics, the pioneer poll aggregator, never included these bogus polls – either in the RCP Poll Average or in the voluminous number of surveys cited daily on our polling pages.
“RCP has a very high standard for including polls in our averages, which this pollster did not begin to meet,” explained Kavon W. Nikrad, RCP’s director of polling. “They were a new pollster with no track record to evaluate. They also had a ‘placeholder-style’ Google Sites website, had no staff directory on that website, and no social media history to look back on to establish that they were an actual, legitimate polling firm.”
“Meeting these criteria does not mean automatic inclusion in RCP’s averages,” Nikrad added, “but they are a start.”
The organizations that did take the bait were reluctant to give credit to RealClearPolitics. This was especially true of the New York Times, which is no surprise given its dubious track record in that regard. To give credit where it’s due, however, although FiftyPlusOne was one of the polling sites duped by Wedgewood, it was that group’s suspicions that cracked the case.
“Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public,” Wedgewood insisted Tuesday after being outed. “It was designed as a wake-up call.”
Few seasoned political observers are buying that explanation, least of all FiftyPlusOne. “This is incredibly misleading,” tweeted Cooper Burton of FiftyPlusOne. His site, Burton added, “was planning to publish an investigation into Wedgewood’s polls tomorrow morning, and reached out to them this morning for comment. This is just an attempt to save face after they realized we caught them.”
Similarly, when several California media outlets cited the “Median Strategies” fake mayoral race number (Karen Bass tweeted it out) the young huckster behind it claimed he was simply trying to show how easy it was to fake a poll. But because he was about to be exposed by The Los Angeles Times, the most immediate suspicion was that he was trying to profit by manipulating the prediction markets.
Likewise, Wedgewood’s self-serving prattle, albeit from behind a cloak of anonymity, begged the question of its true motivations. Were they trying to influence elections by suppressing one side’s vote? Were they merely trying to turn a profit? Just doing it for thrills? Wedgewood did raise a small amount of money for one poll by using GoFundMe, but if they were wagering on outcomes, that could be potentially profitable. One thing is certain: As their poll their numbers entered the political bloodstream they did alter the perceptions – and perhaps the dynamics – of some races.
“Imagine that. Wedgewood took money from donors and handed over raw data it had invented,” wrote Matt Margolis of PJ Media. “Sorry, but that’s not a harmless experiment. In fact, these phony numbers did have real-world impact.”
Fallout
The effects range from Louisiana and Mississippi, where Democrats were buoyed by unlikely Wedgewood surveys – perhaps into making unorthodox spending decisions – showing the Senate races had suddenly tightened to within the margin of error, to Maine, where a fabricated Wedgewood poll showed Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner trailing Susan Collins. Also, the phony Wedgewood poll claimed that 75% of Maine voters wanted Platner to drop out if another personal scandal surfaced (which it did).
Although the political leanings of the anonymous Wedgewood hustlers are uncertain, Nate Silver, who included the poll in his averages, noted Tuesday, “These polls tended to be about 1 point more favorable for [Democrats] than the consensus.”
Silver’s new model, which replaced Wedgewood with a Marist University poll, reduced Democrats’ margins in the key Senate races, without altering the picture significantly. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, for instance, saw his lead over Republican Mike Rogers declined from 3.6% percentage points to 3% in Silver’s average.
But that only highlights the possible harm caused by the Wedgewood fraud. Its biggest impact was probably in the Michigan primary narrowly won by El-Sayed. In mid-April, Emerson College Polling had the Senate primary among likely Democratic voters as a three-way race between El-Sayed (24%), Mallory McMorrow (24%), and Haley Stevens (13%). The survey was discouraging for Stevens because it showed Stevens’ support waning while El-Sayed and McMorrow were both gaining. Then, disaster hit – for McMorrow.
In June, Wedgewood fabricated a poll claiming McMorrow’s support had collapsed – to 9%. It wasn’t the lone survey that had her declining precipitously, but Wedgewood also had McMorrow as the only Democrat unable to beat Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election matchup. McMorrow says it devastated the morale of the campaign, prompted reporters to hound her about when she was dropping out, dried up donations, and basically derailed the whole campaign. “That killed us,” she wrote.
Bipartisan ire
Veteran party professionals from both major political parties are incensed. Some Democrats think Wedgewood was a Republican front group. Some Republicans believe the reverse. The consensus is that these fake pollsters damaged the democratic process and may have committed crimes.
“These people are absolute scumbags,” former Kamala Harris advisor Mike Nellis told Fox News. “They can try to claim that they have some moral high ground here, but they lied about their polling data, got caught, and are freaking out because they’ve committed fraud.”
Nellis added that those responsible for the Wedgewood stunt “should be run out of American politics, and if they can be, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Veteran GOP pollster Jim McLaughlin, noting that beginning in June Wedgewood gave Democrats leads in all the battleground races (Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Maine, Ohio and Kansas), expressed the view all their fake data was intended to promote Democrats over Republicans in the midterms.
“These are suppression polls trying to support their favored Democrat candidates and trying to suppress money, volunteers and donors on GOP campaigns,” McLaughlin said. “I would like to see some attorney general go after these folks for fraud and election interference.”
On Wednesday, poll aggregators from Nate Silver and The New York Times to Decision Desk HQ were scrubbing their averages to remove the influence of this fraud from their data. News outlets like Newsweek were going back and correcting or deleting some of their stories.
Not to sound smug, because we’re not perfect, but there was always an easier way for political junkies: They could just rely on RealClearPolitics.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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[ H/T WorldNetDaily ]
