It didn’t get much attention in the mainstream media. But the case of a firm calling itself Wedgewood Polls shows why trust in public polling continues to erode in this midterm election cycle.
After its results and methods were challenged, Wedgewood Polls admitted that its numbers were phony. The firm said its fake polls, which had been included as authentic by several media outlets, were an “experiment” to test the vulnerabilities and lack of oversight in the political polling industry.
But Republicans were not surprised that most of this fake polling tended to benefit Democratic candidates and provided Democrats with the ability to claim “momentum” in their campaigns. That often translates into greater fundraising, which can provide the winning edge in close elections.
For example, Wedgewood’s results were intended to make it appear that the U.S. Senate race in deep-red Mississippi was a toss-up, two weeks before Election Day.
“These are suppression polls trying to support their favored Democrat candidates and trying to suppress money, volunteers and donors on GOP campaigns,” veteran pollster Jim McLaughlin said. “Media should be forcing these polls they report on to disclose demographics and weighting.”
The media has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. Despite having “no real data” for the vast majority of its supposed surveys, Wedgewood polling was added to major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub, and treated as a legitimate data source. Their vetting obviously fell short. Was it because they liked the pro-Democratic results that Wedgewood was selling?
Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan Democrat who dropped out of her party’s Senate primary in June amid a three-way race with Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, said a Wedgewood poll directly contributed to her campaign’s collapse.
The candidate said the poll led to a decline in donations, lowered morale among staffers and fed a negative news cycle. Now, far-left Mr. El-Sayed is the party’s nominee.
Ms. McMorrow said the case shows that Democrats should “blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.”
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.
This fall, poll after poll predicts Democrats are headed for a blue wave in the midterms. It’s not rocket science — the high cost of living, gasoline and diesel have angered many voters in both parties.
But the concern hanging over these races nationwide is whether polls can be trusted.
In addition to examples of deliberate manipulation such as Wedgewood, pollsters have been way off the mark in many recent elections for a variety of reasons.
For example, fewer people are answering phone calls from unknown numbers, and response rates keep dropping. Automated phone surveys have been hobbled by the disappearance of landlines, and voters are increasingly unwilling to answer calls from unknown numbers or sit through long online surveys.
Matt Towery, the Republican pollster who runs InsiderAdvantage, a polling and market research firm, said some polls are missing a key dynamic. He calls it the “silver wave” — a possible surge of older voters that could expose flaws in the polling and reshape the outcome on Nov. 3.
Early voting offers some hints. In Georgia, fewer than 70,000 early votes have come from 18- to 29-year-olds, compared with more than 549,000 from voters 65 and older. Ohio tells a similar story: 406,000 early votes from the white-haired crowd, against fewer than 50,000 from the 34-and-younger crowd.
Robert Cahaly, who runs polling and market research firm Trafalgar Group, said voters 50 and older are far more willing to vote than younger Americans, who often tell pollsters they will cast a ballot and then do not follow through.
He also said seniors who were less enthusiastic about President Trump in 2024 than about past Republican nominees are drifting back toward the Republican Party.
Older voters are also worried about the rise of socialism in the United States, he said.
Many media and university polls overrepresent college-educated and higher-income voters, who have trended Democratic and have more time to kill, while missing the working-class and older voters who have moved toward Republicans.
There are many ways to put a thumb on the scale of elections. More than ever, it shows the importance of simply casting your vote and making your voice heard.
