A crazy, crazy story unfolding tonight in the online virtual terrain of political social media and poll-watching. It’s late. But I will to give you the bare outline. Seemingly out of the blue earlier this evening an outfit called “Wedgewood Polling” put out a press release stating that all but one of their polls had been fake and that the fakery was all part of a “social experiment” to test how easy it would be to produce fake polls that got aggregated on the big aggregation sites and made their way into news stories. If you’re thinking, wait, didn’t I hear something like this last summer? Yes, you did. There was a smaller-scale version of this, with the same “social experiment” rationale back in August. “Wedgewood,” though, released a lot of polls, in a number of high profile races, not just two or three of them. And there’s at least an argument that they meaningfully impacted some Democratic primary races. They certainly helped shape some campaign narratives. They had appeared to be the only independent poll of the Mississippi Senate race and the only one at all since August.
But then it got weirder.
G. Elliott Morris of FiftyPlusOne announced that his team had been investigating Wedgewood, with some pretty complex and sophisticated sleuthing, and were about to report that Wedgewood’s polls were likely fake. That triggered the press release. Here’s their story, with the addition of more reporting after the press release confirmed the fakery from “Wedgewood” itself. Definitely read the FiftyPlusOne piece I just linked. It’s fascinating sleuthing. And they deserve a lot of credit for smoking these guys out.
According to the Wedgewood press release at least, all the polls were fake but one they did in Nebraska and which they raised money for online through a GoFundMe account. Maybe. But it also occurs to me that they may well now be saying that one was real because raising money like that for a fake poll could probably yield a wire fraud charge. The rest of it is deeply wrong. But it’s not clear how it would be illegal. Raising money for a fraudulent purpose is fraud. That’s a real crime.
Details and online sleuthing are ongoing. But it appears that this was either an effort to game betting sites or possibly an effort to boost DSA/prog candidates by a GOP political operative in Florida, though it’s possible that that Republican was working with someone coming from the left as well. Details are just coming out in dribs and drabs. So treat all these aims and theories about why this happened as tentative. My own hunch is that there was probably some political motive and they also decided to make some money on Kalshi as long as they were at it.
All we can say with certainty at this point is that a semi-sorta-prominent new entrant pollster was publishing fake polls. They had at least some impact. And that it definitely wasn’t a “social experiment,” above and beyond that whole idea being absurd.
