The Wedgewood Fake Polls Scandal

F ake polls are back in the news.

We hear a lot these days about how the polls are fake, and that we should ignore them — especially when polls are delivering bad news for MAGA Republicans. Now, polling is an inexact science; there have always been fair critiques of particular polls and special problems with internal polls released selectively by campaigns, and there are mounting challenges for the polling industry.

But a lot of the attacks on polls are more about misunderstanding polling. If you accept that polls give you a range of probabilities rather than a precise bullseye, that averages of multiple polls are more reliable than any one individual poll, and that polling error can be a few points in one direction in one cycle and a few in the other the next, then you can get a good deal of useful information from reading the polls with an appropriately skeptical eye. There’s a reason, after all, why politicians and campaigns pay so much attention to polls when their money and jobs are on the line.

All of that being said, we do get a case every now and then of outright fabricated polling. The last major scandal broke in 2010, when progressive blog Daily Kos published polls by a firm called Research 2000 that turned out to be so thoroughly fabricated that Kos founder Markos Moulitsas publicly renounced R2k and sued them for fraud. Whatever Donald Trump may think, you can’t sue a pollster for shoddy or biased polls, but pretending to take a poll or reporting something that wasn’t what the poll showed? That’s fraud. And, in a development that would foreshadow this week’s controversy, one of the major ways in which R2k’s fake polls shaped political reality was in Democratic primary contests where they showed progressive candidates to be electable in the general election. That’s been a subject of controversy in the 2026 primary season.

Now, comes word that “Wedgewood Polls,” a new polling company that emerged this election cycle, was an elaborate fraud. Only after getting caught did Wedgewood put out a statement saying that this was a Sokal-style “experiment” — an elaborate prank — designed 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?” Whether that was really the plan, or whether they are now just saving face ahead of exposure, is almost beside the point.

Wedgewood now says that only one of its polls (conducted in Nebraska) was real, yet it was cited on television by MS NOW and included in poll aggregators such as the New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, Decision Desk HQ, and Vote Hub (it was also cited in an NR post which has since been updated). Nate Silver’s forecasts shifted slightly towards Republicans when he removed Wedgewood polling from his forecast model. (Not taken in: RealClearPolitics.) To its credit, however, it was FiftyPlusOne that launched the investigation that exposed Wedgewood. Outlets have since removed the fake pollster.

This is actually the second fake pollster exposed this cycle. Median Strategies, which claimed that socialist Francesca Hong had a 23-point lead in the Democratic primary for governor of Wisconsin (she lost) and which also touted fake polls in the Los Angeles mayoral race, shut down in August.

Wedgewood has likewise been seized upon for good news for Democrats in general and Democratic Socialists in particular. Just a week ago, Mississippi Democrat Scott Colom was touting a Wedgewood poll showing him tied in a Senate race against Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Its polling of the Louisiana Republican Senate primary was disastrously off.

The Wedgewood fraud has come under particular fire concerning the Michigan Senate race. Its polls helped Abdul El-Sayed convince Michigan Democrats to choose him over Haley Stevens and Mallory McMorrow. The McMorrow and Stevens camps have both vented their frustrations. McMorrow said that after a June poll showed her dropping into single digits, “Donations dried up, volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do,” and “reporters hounded me with calls to drop out,” which she ultimately did. A McMorrow super PAC fundraiser said that “this poll was used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.” Neera Tanden, a vocal Stevens supporter, crowed: “Man the pollsters that showed Haley behind over the summer were either made up or highly partisan. And a lot of smart people fell for the op.” That echoes charges made by Stevens backers during the primary, before El-Sayed won by a much narrower margin than projected.

In the heat of a contested primary where partisans have real, serious concerns about one candidate’s electability — whether that candidate is El-Sayed, Hong, Graham Platner, or Ken Paxton — there’s an enormous temptation to cite polls to make that point, or to rebut it. Yet, general election polls taken during an acrimonious primary are often misleading even when conducted honestly. The problem is that applying sober, adult judgment about candidates and what experience tells us is out of fashion. Nobody wants to hear it.

Another potential angle to this, which creates more direct incentives for this sort of misconduct, is the pervasive entanglement of polling with online prediction and betting markets. Some internet sleuths argue that Wedgewood may have been trading on prediction markets affected by its own fake data. I remain profoundly mistrustful of the predictive value of these markets, to say nothing of the generally bad moral influence of the explosion of gambling online in sports, politics, and everything else in the past decade.

Maybe that’s also my experience as a securities lawyer talking. I spent years litigating and even publishing articles, including work with Ph.D. economists, on how courts analyze stock and bond market movements. The law presumes that efficient markets for publicly traded securities are informationally efficient: that is, they swiftly incorporate new information into the price. That doesn’t mean markets are infallible in their judgment of the meaning of new information, but it means that they reflect the combined judgments of large numbers of investors, including sophisticated professionals. But the presumption doesn’t apply if the market doesn’t meet empirical tests, ranging from tests of the depth of liquidity in the market to investigation of how it actually responds to news. Capital markets are also heavily regulated to deter insider trading. Very little of what shows up in the economic literature on efficient capital markets, or in the legal regime governing them, is true of political prediction markets. I regard them as little better than witchcraft.

Like so many of our institutions, the polling and poll-analysis industries need to keep their own house in order. If you don’t, the conspiracy theories don’t just get believed — they come true.