US Pollster Just Admitted Faking Its Numbers

US Pollster Just Admitted Faking Its Numbers. By Tom Durante in Media-ite.

A national polling company cited in numerous outlets, including The New York Times and MS NOW, has revealed it made up its data, saying that doing so was “far too easy.”

Wedgewood Polls made the shocking admission in an X post Tuesday night after FiftyPlusOne, which reports on polling, confronted them about credentials and data. …

In addition to The Times and MS NOW, scores of media outlets and prominent poll aggregators cited Wedgewood polling data, including; Newsweek, Decision Desk HQ, and Mediaite.

Wedgewood is remarkably the second polling company of late to admit its findings are made up. In August, Median Polling Strategies reported that democratic socialist Francesca Hong held a commanding lead over incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in the LA mayor’s race. After Hong was handily defeated, Median shut down when confronted about its data by The Los Angeles Times.

The Fallout was Huge! By Matt Margolis at PJ Media.

Wedgewood Polls now claims the entire operation was a social experiment meant to expose lazy vetting in the polling world. Some election observers aren’t buying that explanation, and the timing of the confession gives them every reason to doubt it. …

Sorry, but that’s not a harmless experiment. In fact, these phony numbers did have real-world impact.

El-Sayed leaned heavily on Wedgewood’s polling to sell Democrat voters on his electability. Mallory McMorrow, who ran against him in the Michigan primary, took to X to describe what the stunt cost her campaign. She pointed to a late-June Wedgewood poll that showed her sinking into single digits, numbers she said contradicted her campaign’s internal polling. In the aftermath, her donations dried up, her volunteers were left devastated and begging for direction, and reporters bombarded her with calls to get out of the race.

Without a doubt, a fake poll can affect an election. It can stop a candidate from raising money, boost another candidate, or cause a party to invest in a place it otherwise wouldn’t. And it can lead voters to think the result is already decided before any ballot has been cast.

It’s been the same for well over a decade in the US. Pollsters boost the Democrats in the months before the election, to demoralize the right and scare off their donors. Then, in the week or two before the election, they turn down the boost so that their polls aren’t exposed as wildly inaccurate.

Of course, the boosting of Democrats in polls also manufactures plausibility for the consequences of massive electoral fraud — which could establish the condition for a color revolution.

But simply inventing fake data is a new low, AFAIK. My understanding is that up until now the pollsters biased their polls merely by oversampling the left-voting demographic groups.

UPDATE: