A polling firm that spent months boosting far-left Democratic candidates has admitted it made the whole thing up. Wedgewood Polling released a statement Tuesday night confessing it used “fabricated numbers” for what it called an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” So basically, fraud, but with homework.
The fake polls showed up in real places. Wedgewood’s surveys were cited by Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign during Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary against state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. The nonpartisan aggregator Political Polls also used Wedgewood data in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, where it showed socialist Francesca Hong leading Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany. Nothing says “credible polling” quite like numbers cooked up in what turned out to be a stunt.
McMorrow says the fallout was real and painful. Wedgewood’s numbers, she said, caused her donations to dry up and had reporters “hounded” her with calls to drop out. “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,” she wrote on X. Democrat strategist Jennifer Holdsworth, who ran a super PAC supporting McMorrow, said the fake poll “was used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”
High-profile outlets got played too. Wedgewood fake polling data was cited by The New York Times and Decision Desk HQ, both of which have since scrubbed the numbers. The Times removed 15 Wedgewood polls published between June and October. Decision Desk HQ pulled 17. The Times noted it had even put Wedgewood through a vetting process, asking about pollster identities, sampling methods, and funding sources. Apparently the answers were convincing enough, which tells you something about how easy it is to fool the mainstream media.
Democratic strategists are furious, and they’re not hiding it. These people are absolute scumbags,” veteran Democratic strategist and former Kamala Harris advisor Mike Nellis told Fox News Digital. “They can try to claim that they have some moral high ground here, but they lied about their polling data, got caught, and are freaking out because they’ve committed fraud.” Nellis added, “The people responsible for this should be run out of American politics, and if they can be, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Wedgewood insists it was never trying to swing an election, calling the whole thing a “wake-up call” about data integrity. Independent outlet FiftyPlusOne wasn’t buying it. Co-founder G. Elliott Morris wrote on X that his team was already investigating Wedgewood and had emailed them for comment the morning before they released their statement. They are trying to cover up their fraud with the ‘we were doing a social experiment’ excuse,” he wrote. Former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor called it simply “lying and fraud.”
A GoFundMe tied to a group called “Wedgewood Polls” raised $500 of an intended $5,000 to fund polling in Nebraska races. Nellis asked whether that crowdfunded money will be returned, and if not, whether prosecution follows. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have long questioned the reliability of polls, and after 2016 showed Hillary Clinton supposedly cruising to victory, that skepticism looks smarter every day.
With control of Congress on the line in November, every poll is being treated like scripture. This whole debacle is a reminder that maybe they shouldn’t be. The only thing Wedgewood actually proved is that faking data, calling it science, and getting the New York Times to print it is disturbingly easy.
