A firm that has published widely circulated midterm political polls has acknowledged that its numbers were “fabricated” and claimed they were part of an experiment that duped some media outlets.
Wedgewood Polls, the bogus firm, described itself in a press release Tuesday as an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.”
The group boasted that despite having no “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 treated as a legitimate data source.”
People were interested in these podcasts
They denied nefarious intentions, saying the project “was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public; it was designed as a wake-up call.”
Wedgewood published several widely circulated polls, mostly on Senate races. Some had surprising results, such as an Oct. 14 Mississippi Senate race survey purporting to show the Republican incumbent leading by just four points.
The polling often favored Democrats, showing leads for Democratic candidates in Kansas, Maine, and Texas.
Nate Silver, a prominent polling aggregator, announced Wednesday that he had banned Wedgewood from his polling aggregation.
“We removed Wedgewood ‘polls’ from our database,” he wrote. “These polls tended to be ~1 point more favorable for [Democrats] than the consensus.”
Mr. Silver’s new model, which removed the Wedgewood polling and added a new Marist poll, shifted the estimate of Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s lead over Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan from a 3.6% lead to 3.0%.
Mr. Silver also had included Wedgewood polling in his averages for the Georgia and Mississippi Senate races.
FiftyPlusOne, a polling aggregator, claimed credit on Tuesday for forcing Wedgewood to acknowledge the hoax.
The aggregator said Wedgewood provided a fraudulent methodology statement and described its leadership and funding sources. The aggregator said this helped Wedgewood appear legitimate and be included in the model.
“This was sufficient information for us to aggregate the surveys at the time,” said FiftyPlusOne. “When we are provided information that is similar to information we have received in the past from real polling firms, it is impossible to know at the time that it is manufactured.”
FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood about suspicious discrepancies in its polling shortly before Wedgewood released the public statement acknowledging the polling was false.
Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan Democrat who dropped out of her party’s Senate primary this June amid a three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens and now-nominee Mr. El-Sayed, said a Wedgewood poll directly contributed to her campaign’s collapse.
Their fraudulent June survey claimed to show Ms. McMorrow in a distant third place with a mere 9% support from likely Democratic voters.
She dropped out of the race just six days after the polling came out.
The results included detailed cross-tabulations and head-to-head polling between Democratic candidates and Mr. Rogers.
This polling showed Mr. El-Sayed as the strongest Democrat in the general election, and claimed he had a seven-point lead over Ms. Stevens in the primary.
He ultimately won the nomination by one point.
Mr. El-Sayed’s campaign featured Wedgewood’s polling in a July fundraising email emphasizing his electability that highlighted The New York Times’ aggregated polls.
“The numbers don’t lie,” it said. “Poll after poll has us beating Mike Rogers.”
The candidate said the poll led to a decline in donations, lowered morale among staffers, and fed a negative news cycle.
Ms. McMorrow said the development shows Democrats should “blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.”
Wedgewood also published a survey in July on Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, showing Democratic candidate Francesca Hong leading the race.
“We’ve got momentum, folks!” wrote Ms. Hong in a social media post that included an image of the Wedgewood polling and a link to donate to her campaign.
Ms. Hong ultimately lost narrowly to David Crowley, who re-entered the race after previously dropping out.
It is not the first polling hoax of the cycle.
In August, Median Strategies admitted its polls were fake, and justified them as a “short-term social experiment” on the “political information ecosystem.”
The group published false polling showing commanding leads for Mayor Karen Bass in the Los Angeles mayoral primary, as well as for Democrat Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.