A new company whose polls had influenced campaign decisions and helped shape the midterms narrative admitted that it was faking its polling data on Tuesday night, setting off a firestorm in the electionsphere.
Wedgewood Polls, facing an imminent publication of an investigation from FiftyPlusOne showing it was fabricating its numbers, declared late Tuesday night that it had been an “experimental project” to show how an “entirely fabricated polling firm” could sway public opinion while painting themselves as the good guys. They’d left an impact and been included by multiple credible polling aggregators including The New York Times — and mentioned twice in POLITICO’s Morning Score polling roundup.
Speculation is flying about what, exactly, Wedgewood was trying to achieve, and there’s still little public information about the defunct company that had crowdfunded thousands of dollars for its fake data. Was it an effort to boost progressives Democrats in primaries? If so, were progressives or Republicans really behind it? Was it being used to game betting markets? Were top operatives using the bogus data to make spending decisions? Were aggregation accounts too quick to jump on posting the data?
An email to the account listed on Wedgewood’s X account bounced back, and previous PDFs of polls that were tied to the account are no longer available online.
Regardless of what Wedgewood said it was trying to achieve (they remain adamant the project “was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public”) — pollsters, operatives and candidates alike said there were real world implications for posting fake data online.
Mallory McMorrow, the unsuccessful Michigan Democratic Senate candidate who dropped out before her primary, said a fake Wedgewood poll that showed her crashing to single-digit support against Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens “dried up” donations, “devastated” volunteers and led to numerous calls to exit the race.
“It killed us,” McMorrow wrote on X. “These were some of the absolute worst days on the campaign. Especially for my team. There are no words to explain the morale blow, and nothing I could do or say to my team to fix it.”
Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic operative who ran a super PAC supporting McMorrow, said the Wedgewood poll “was used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”
The account also posted a poll showing democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, when there was scant public polling, something that contributed to the narrative she was ahead before the election (which she lost).
They also posted a poll showing the Mississippi Senate race within reach, just before Democrats plowed money into the state. Scott Colom, the Democrat running for the seat, blasted the poll to his press list as proof there was “massive momentum” behind him.
That led election watchers to argue that Wedgewood’s data was being used to make spending decisions in top outside groups, which elicited a response from Democrats’ main Senate super PAC.
“Absolutely not. We don’t make spending or strategic decisions based on external polling,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, said on X.
In its investigation, FiftyPlusOne said it had included Wedgewood in its aggregator because the firm was founded by people who had worked in the polling industry previously.
There’s also been broad finger-pointing at the aggregator X accounts that post polls frequently — and sometimes without verifying their accuracy.
“You posted our polls multiple times. If you suspected it was fake, why did you post our results?” Wedgewood’s account shot back after Polling USA wrote that “my suspicions about Wedgewood were correct.”
The whole ordeal illuminates just how big a problem polling could be in 2028, where both parties will have presidential primaries and polling can shift the narrative on a dime.
“What I’m concerned about is essentially information pollution, things that are either intended to skew prediction markets or just straight misinformation flying around,” Charlotte Swasey, a pollster for the Democratic group Searchlight, told POLITICO Magazine recently. “It would be really difficult, especially in a primary, to tell people that what they’re seeing about their preferred candidate isn’t real.”
A version of this article first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.
