From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread
cip.uw.edu
cip.uw.edu
Would we have obtained the same "confession" after next Tuesday had they remained unexposed?
Last week the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls with questions about the authenticity of its surveys. In response, the team behind the supposed pollster acknowledged that its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”
The project had an impact on election campaigns, with polls it did since June on many races, “shifting from one midterm battleground to another,” the New York Times reported, including Michigan, Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin.
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The media has reported that Wedgewood began releasing polls in June. On July 7, a story by Urban Milwaukee raised questions about a Wedgewood poll on the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Up to then, the most recent Marquette poll had shown Hong with 14% of the vote, and a more recent internal poll released by the campaign of Sara Rodriguez showed Hong at 22%. But the Wedgewood poll had Hong at a whopping 30%, which could “help convince Democrats who doubt her electability that she is running away with the race,” the story reported, noting that Wisconsin Republican Chairman Brian Schimming had said that for Republicans Hong would be the best opponent.
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But the Wedgewood “experiment” clearly sought to push Democratic voters in a way that would help Republican candidates. Just as it tried to elevate the candidacy of Francesca Hong, the most liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, it released a fake poll showing Mallory McMorrow, the moderate candidate in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, “plummeting into single digits,” as Time reported. “McMorrow said donations ‘dried up’ and she was ‘hounded’ with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the infamous’ Wedgewood poll numbers.”Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .
Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.
> 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental.
Not a pollster, but Nate Silver publicly challenged someone on Twitter to a $100k bet over how red Florida would go. IIRC Silver was predicting 3-5% margin, Twitterer said minimum 8%. Trump won by 14%. Even Silver, who lived and breathed analyzing polls and their reliability, made a mistake of that magnitude with his own money on the line. Sometimes the votes don't line up with polling, and sometimes the professionals genuinely don't see it coming.
It failed in 2024 when it didn't weight its model to handle differences in demographics vs the sampled population. She accounted for age, sex, and district - but not education, party identification, or past voting behavior. (The specifics of why the model failed is up for debate, but it was the same model that had been used for many years and was reasonably accurate).
From 2023, here's a description of her polling methodology:
https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/10530/j-ann-...
But it's difficult, even I know where to look and a lot of the methodology statements get hidden or are inadequate to make that assumption. The main thing I'm going to tell you that distinguishes us from most other polling, not all, there's some very good polls out there that do what I do, which is we don't make assumptions about what that future electorate is going to look like. We let the data -- we try to get out of the way of the data showing us. So, you'll look and they'll say how they weighted the data, this that and the other, and then they include in that who the likely demographics of the 2024 caucus are likely to be. And I go, really? How do you know what that is likely to be? Or they're weighting it based on who they voted for in the 2020 election or other factors like that, or maybe they're only talking to people who have caucused before. And this approach I call polling backward, that if you're creating a model of the future, what are you going to base it on? You're going to base it on what happened in the past. And I know that things can change. So, I want to have my fingers off the data, my dirty fingers I try to keep them off the data, so it will reveal to me how that's going to go.
From 2024 https://www.iowapbs.org/shows/iowapress/episode/11885/j-ann-...
But for everybody else we keep them on the phone to get age, sex, what county they live in. That is going to give us some geography so that we can weight all of those people, I think there were 1,100 and some in our final poll, to look like the state of Iowa because that we know. And then we extract from that those people who made our likely voter screen and interviewed them. So, if they are proportionately more women who pass that screen, they are going to show up here but they are weighted at the statewide level. It's a little geeky. But one of the things I've been thinking about is with caucuses we take you if you definitely or probably will participate and maybe our screen was too tight. I don't know, there's no way to undo it and sort of check, well what would the probably people have said, because we very politely terminated the people who just said they would probably vote. But that has been our system since 2008.I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.
If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.
Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306130304/https://projects....
Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.
The forecaster in question was fully aware of everything you're saying and yet he blew 100k on what he thought was a sure thing that turned out to not be. Maybe if he was as statistically-aware as you claim, he would not have made the bet, since he should have known there was a reasonable statistical probability he was wrong. I don't demand Nate get "100% of predictions correct", I'm mocking him because he's overrated and he made an outrageously confident prediction that blew up in his face when almost anyone who wasn't high on their own supply could see he was wrong, or at least could clearly see there was no basis for such a confident prediction. "There is an 80% chance Trump wins Florida by < 8pts" is very different from "I'll put down 100k that Trump wins Florida by < 8 pts."
Of course the real problem is "statistical probabilities" don't actually factor into it and 538's model is actually not that well calibrated, and anyway we're talking about real-world forecasting, for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information unless the only reason you care about election forecasts is to gamble on prediction markets.
> for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information
I mean, this is basically how weather forecasts work too. Would you say that weather forecasts are useless? I don't think they are. I think the existence of weather forecasts results in people being prepared for rain more than they otherwise would be, even if sometimes they neglect to bring an umbrella because the forecast predicted a low chance of rain. In the same way, political forecasting is actionable in terms of how politicians and their parties conduct their campaigns, focusing on areas where spending their time, energy, and campaign funds will get the most reward for their investment. I suspect a political party that makes use of forecasting will outperform one that doesn't if all else could be equalized. As for benefits to the general public, one of the big reasons Silver got into forecasting was to counteract the exact thing you were talking about earlier - he hated pundits crafting a narrative and trying to influence public opinion on elections baselessly, so his goal was to establish a more objective, numbers-based approach that was less susceptible to people just making shit up about elections.
Yes.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/f...
One can debate how the change in political polling has been done over the past decades. Reverse polling (weighting) vs forward polling (weighting).
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2026/09/16/weighting-pol...
https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surve...
Seltzer used (and consistently used) forward polling. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/03/nx-s1-5177322/high-profile-io...
Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.
If you believe polls are worthless, then don't look at them. However, a lot of the enthusiasm and donations for a political candidate are driven by polling.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/former-miami-lawmaker-fra... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Artiles#Election_fraud
this still seems like the republican party trying to do some election fraud against themselves?
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Items/Oct29-5.html
It ends with:
Yesterday, The New York Times threw a wrench in the works. It reported that Dan J. was not happily living in his quiet fishing village reading books about fish and tending to his garden when he suddenly decided to run for the Senate. Nope. In fact, Peltola's team combed through voting lists to find all the Dan Sullivans in the state and then carefully selected Dan J. and helped him get on the ballot. This sort of trickery is actually not unusual. Other candidates have been doing this kind of stuff for years. The question is whether it will affect the election. Republicans who were planning to vote for Dan S. will still do so. The big unknown is are there many Peltola voters who will be disgusted by this trick and switch to Dan S. The disclosure may not be fatal, though, because: (1) not all Alaskans will even know about this before they vote, (2) some Alaskans have already voted, and (3) some people who like Peltola will admire her cleverness for pulling this off.
The revelation could possibly affect the lawsuit, but probably not. Parties often recruit candidates. In primaries, it is not unusual for parties to (financially) support someone on the other team who they think would be a weak general-election opponent. This kind of stuff is actually the original use of the thing we call rodent reproduction. Republicans did it this year in a couple of Democratic House primaries, for example. It is scuzzy, but perfectly legal, to contribute to a candidate who you think is a weak opponent to your candidate. In fact, there have been many primaries where a Democrat switched his or her registration to Republican in order to vote for a crazy fringe candidate, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this development is not going to help Peltola. (V)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
On top of that it's not election fraud, though it is potentially some kind of fraud if they were involved in betting markets.
... and its months after she tanked her campaign.
you cant really plummet from single digit to single digit polls.
Wedgewood was quite abrupt and profanely offensive in their (re)actions in shutting down their operations, if I have read the account correctly.
It certainly appears that they were not expecting to be caught.
The post mentions "Jack Sims and Andrew Prater," whom I assume will now face far more professional review.
https://blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftyplusone-just-caught-a-...
If a fake polling company could be set up to release polls for underreported races that are being traded on prediction markets then you could make a good bit of money by timing your trades to the release of your fake poll.
The goal is not just to influence the prediction markets to game a profit, it would also be to hope that once the polls influence the prediction markets, that it will feed back into the voters to actually influence the result.
I think this is a silly claim of a very complicated topic. Our ability to trust various institutions (e.g. the newspaper, government, banks, markets, pollsters, academia, tv experts) in both their expertise and morality obviously has varied over time and by country. Some of it we obviously have lost (at least temporarily), e.g. trust in the US government, some other areas remain strong.
This situation of having entirely fabricated poll causing a candidate drop out of a race was not on our radar (obviously, or else McMorrow and her doners would have waited for more than 1 poll). Therefore it represents a reduction in public trust with negative externalities beyond just this one race.
It is insane that Democratic candidates are dropping out of races as a result of reading fake polls on twitter. If their candidacy could be destroyed by that, it shouldn't have been started in the first place. Also, typical authoritarian solution to try to figure out how to eliminate or prosecute fake polls, rather than to end the substitution of triangulation for belief. It would be wonderful if someone could believe in something other than winning. You might win; people are starved for candidates who believe in something other than personal enrichment.
You can't libel the general public. I can lie about whatever poll I want, as long as I'm not selling you anything (which would be fraud.) Politicians can't be prosecuted for the promises they made during the campaign that they immediately abandoned after being elected, but I, a random citizen, am held to a higher standard about my pronouncements of the opinions of the randomly chosen and race-weighted public? Get out of here...
she ruined her campaign by trying to make it about hasan piker, who wasnt running, and a good portion of the people she needed as supporters kinda like piker on at least a surface check of what he has to say.
i think more what happened is all her donors were already out, and they just pointed at that poll. its not like it was a unique poll.
pointing at the fake poll gets her(and her consultants) some cover for having made bad campaign choices
- the election
- the betting markets
1) someone might have paid them to do a real poll and they faked it, which is just straightforward fraud with a clear victim.
2) (the fun one) they might have done it to manipulate political prediction markets, which gets into securities fraud questions.
If we assume gambling about the outcome of an election is "futures trading", then fraudulent election polls are the same kind of criminal activity as someone putting out fraudulent corn-harvest reports when trading corn futures.
i think this is more like putting out fake weather reports than fake corn harvest reports.
A more serious question of how and why an organization such as the NYTimes (and others of similar stature) would so easily and quickly incorporate polling data from a brand new polling company into its election data and articles and be so easily fooled.
And, when this was uncovered, they did not do much more than what seemed the minimal amount to CYA, quietly backing out the data and issuing an editors note that few people would find.
They do not seem that interested in protecting their reputation, or maybe they don't believe their readers care.
Trump has been manipulating the media, attacking the electoral process, lying, using federal resources to persecute political rivals... "all sides" seems unfair.
> "Right-Wing Influencers Amplify the Controversy"
Oh, I get it now.
I think a big problem is that, as a poll aggregator, the more you pick and choose which polls are allowed to be aggregated, the more risk there is that you are inserting bias into the result through selective exclusion. Erring on the side of broadly accepting poll data means less room for bias. But they do talk about the need to raise their standards due to the increasing ease of producing fake data in this podcast with FiftyPlusOne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neuot3aMkrY
For this specific issue, I am not surprised about fake polling data. What I am surprised is that the NYT did not vet a newly formed polling company, and then put out articles that have quite possibly influenced an election based on purposely fake data. THAT is their job - to vet these things - their political bias does not bother me as all media is biased, but if all they do is republish whatever they find without due diligence, I might as well use Claude to give me the news.
I do not care about FiftyPlusOne, they might be great, they might be bad, I do not have time to figure that out. However, if a place like the NYT does not add value above the crap noise we see, what is the point ? Ignore everything that you see and hear ?
Ironically, is is the NYT that just "broke" the story about what is going on in Alaska. All I knew about that story, until now, was that the Republicans were threatening to invalidate the election there if they did not win. No surprises there. Actually, yes, there were surprises. Can I trust the NYT on this ? I do not know.
AI hallucination could be a way to generate fake polling data, but that doesn't matter given that the intent is to generate fake polling data. It could have been done with a bag of dice just as easily.
Yeah a new company setup a few months before the election doing this. Doesn't sound shady at all.
The pivot to claiming it was an experiment is just damage control for being caught.