‘They want to suppress our vote,’ Trump pollster John McLaughlin said. ‘These are not impartial media polls. These are biased media polls.’
Absolute scumbags.
That’s how Democrat strategist and former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis described Wedgewood Polling, another faux “election survey company” confessing that it made up numbers. Why? Wedgewood claims their bogus polls — rolled out in two widely watched Democratic Party primaries — were just an “experimental project.” The experiment was meant to track “the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry,” according to a press release issued Wednesday.
Well, mission accomplished.
These merry pranksters said they wanted to test “a simple hypothesis.”
“How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?” the press release states.
Turns out very easy.
In the release, the fake firm said it had no history, no formal credentials, and certainly no real data backing up its survey releases. That didn’t stop major polling aggregators such as The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne, VoteHub, and Decision Desk from treating the polls as a legitimate data source, the phony pollsters said. The Times acknowledged that it had posted 15 of Wedgewood’s polls, but only after it the phony firm answered its follow-up questions.
“Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms-including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS NOW,” the press release confessed. Newsweek, Decision Desk HQ and Mediaite also cited Wedgewood’s polls, PBS reported.
And as fast as it had arrived on the midterm political scene, Wedgewood disappeared. The website is now an error message. Its email address is no longer operational, hence The Federalist could not reach Wedgwood officials for comment Wednesday.
Wedgewood’s admission was the second such revelation in the past two months. As The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman reported in August, faux pollster Median Strategies announced it, too, was running a “social experiment” on deceptive polling in political races after it pushed out suspect surveys on Wisconsin’s gubernatorial and Los Angeles’ mayoral primary races. The bogus poll was shared by some local TV newscasts, online reporting outlets, and on social media.