A polling outfit called Wedgewood Polls has publicly admitted that the surveys it published were fabricated, after election researchers at FiftyPlusOne caught it manufacturing data and prepared to publish an investigation into the firm.
Wedgewood Polls released a poll over the summer showing Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s support collapsing into the single digits during the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. McMorrow has said that poll was a major factor in her decision to drop out of a three-way race against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and Abdul El-Sayed.
In a statement posted to X, Wedgewood Polls said it fabricated data as a kind of test.
“Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology,” the group wrote. “We 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?”
McMorrow said the poll, released in late June, showed her trailing badly — a result she says was at odds with her campaign’s own internal numbers. She said donations dried up afterward, volunteers lost morale, and reporters began pressing her on when she would exit the race.
“Sure, a point was proven,” McMorrow said. “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.”
The same firm also recently published a poll claiming Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom was running even with incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.). This week, the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC announced it was committing an additional $1.2 million to Colom’s campaign. A spokesperson for the super PAC, Lauren French, told The Post the group “absolutely” did not base that decision on the Wedgewood poll, saying, “We don’t make spending or strategic decisions based on external polling.”
Wedgewood Polls said its goal was “never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public,” and claimed it had conducted one legitimate survey, in Nebraska.
“It was designed as a wake-up call,” the group said. “If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations, the standards for how polling data is vetted, aggregated, and reported must change.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr responded on X by warning broadcasters against failing to vet fake polling data, writing, “The FCC takes these issues seriously. Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes. It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations.”
Wedgewood Polls said it had successfully gotten its numbers picked up by major polling aggregators, including The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub. VoteHub’s head of data science, Zachary Donnini, said he had spoken by phone with the firm’s head pollster for about 15 minutes when Wedgewood first appeared.
“He told me he was a college student at Boston University,” Donnini wrote on X. “A few years ago, I was a college student following politics as a hobby myself, so I try to give people in that position the benefit of the doubt. It’s disappointing to see how this has unfolded, because it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder for the next college kid.”
The episode follows a similar case in August, when a firm called Median Strategies admitted to faking surveys in the Los Angeles mayoral and Wisconsin gubernatorial primaries, also describing the effort as a “short-term social experiment.”
