Wedgewood Polls admits fabricating data used by national media outlets

Decision Desk HQ and New York Times removed Wedgewood results

Wedgewood Polls admitted on Tuesday that it had fabricated numbers used in political surveys, saying the operation was a “social experiment” intended to expose weak scrutiny of the polling industry. The firm issued the admission in a statement on social media after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and election-analysis site, asked it to comment on an investigation.

The statement called the project a “wake-up call” meant “to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” Wedgewood also argued that the results had received too little scrutiny: “Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms,” the statement said. “The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”

FiftyPlusOne’s findings showed how far the fabricated numbers traveled. Newsweek, The Hill, Breitbart, The Daily Beast and Washington Examiner published surveys containing Wedgewood’s fabricated figures. The New York Times, Nate Silver, VoteHub and FiftyPlusOne also included Wedgewood results in their polling databases.

Decision Desk HQ responded by removing 17 polls from its race-level polling lists and averages. The New York Times said in an editor’s note that it had removed all Wedgewood polls from its poll-tracking project.

Earlier in October, FiftyPlusOne researchers received a tip suggesting that Wedgewood had been faking its data, after previously receiving other tips about the firm that lacked evidence. The researchers obtained raw data for Wedgewood’s most recent survey, a Mississippi Senate poll that the company said it had conducted through the online survey platform Pollfish. FiftyPlusOne said it identified discrepancies in the data and confronted Wedgewood with its findings. Wedgewood then published its admission on X.

Wedgewood first came on the polling scene in June, billing itself as an election survey firm that conducted independent political research. Within weeks, a Washington Monthly columnist said on 10 July that the company’s first poll of the Louisiana Republican primary runoff had been “wildly wrong.” Straight Arrow News reported in August that Wedgewood’s website, hosted on Google Sites, listed no employee names, phone number or location. The website had been registered on 26 June, and its X account was created that month.

On 16 August, an Urban Milwaukee journalist called Wedgewood “a shady outfit” after one of its polls of the Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor showed Francesca Hong at 30% “at a time when legitimate polls had her with far less of the vote.”

Adam Carlson, a Democratic pollster at another firm, told Straight Arrow News that he first raised a question about Wedgewood on X and then communicated with someone at the firm. Carlson said the person told him the two-person firm included one progressive and one conservative. The representatives declined to reveal their identities or participate in a video call, saying one of the two people at Wedgewood had previously experienced doxing and online harassment.

Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat who dropped out of a contentious U.S. Senate primary on 5 July, said Wedgewood’s figures showed that her support had plunged in the weeks prior. McMorrow said donations then dried up, volunteers were left “devastated,” and reporters “hounded” her with calls to drop out of the race.

McMorrow wrote on X: “Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in – for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.” She added: “Trust is already at an all-time low. We don’t get out of this mess without rebuilding trust. And media – who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster – needs to take a hard look at what’s legitimate and what’s not.”

The Wedgewood affair followed a separate August episode in which The Guardian tracked the anonymous website Median Strategies to a 21-year-old recent college graduate who had published widely shared fake election polls in Wisconsin, Nevada and California. Median Strategies had abruptly shut down and withdrawn its polling the week prior after questions from a Los Angeles Times reporter.

In an unsigned statement, Median Strategies described its operation as a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.” Rahil Prakash told The Guardian by phone: “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily. And as it turned out, it could.”