Two months ago, we found out that a left-favoring pollster named Median Strategies turned out to be a “social experiment,” which is a fancy academic term for fraud. At the time, I wondered how many other pollsters willing to publish numbers that hinted at momentum for socialism would turn out to be “social experiments.” I meant that as a rhetorical question, a fun bit of snark at a polling industry that had catastrophically misrepresented the electorate in the primaries.
Little did I know that my question would turn out to be prophetic. Wedgewood Polls issued a statement late yesterday admitting to hoaxing people and “news” outlets like the New York Times and M-SNOW with faked results that leaned lefty so hard the polls tipped over. In their statement, Wedgewood claimed that “the polling industry needs major reform” (via Twitchy):
The polling industry needs major reform. Our statement below: https://t.co/Sj8JLYgply
— Wedgewood Polls (@WedgewoodPolls) October 20, 2026
The organizers claim to have perpetrated the hoax to expose how easily other pollsters, aggregators, and media outlets could be duped:
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 [sic] exists in media and public commentary?
The short answer: Far too easy.
If that was truly their intent – and that is far from established yet – then mission accomplished. The New York Times and M-SNOW both get explicitly mentioned as being saps of the Wedgewood hoax, as do aggregators such as FiftyPlueOne and VoteHub. (Notably absent: RealClearPolling, which avoided both Wedgewood and Median Strategies.) And the NYT and M-SNOW weren’t the only little-brains seizing on Wedgewood’s socialist fantasy numbers:
FRAUD ALERT: In the primary, Abdul El-Sayed relied heavily on FAKE Wedgewood polls showing he could beat Mike Rogers in the General Election. The polling showed he was up 15% against Stevens. He won by less than a point. Ignore the noise. Vote for Mike Rogers. Save Michigan. https://t.co/nBtszo0vF8
— Democrats For Mike Rogers (@DemsForMike) October 21, 2026
This “social experiment” story has a couple of problems, however. First off, FiftyPlusOne released its own statement to rebut the claim made by Wedgewood. According to this version of events, the “social experiment” explanation emerged a hot second before FiftyPlusOne exposed Wedgewood as a fraud:
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood Polls, a self-professed polling firm, with a request for comment on an investigation we had conducted into their alleged survey research. They did not respond to our request, but instead posted a public statement on social media admitting that they had been fabricating data. They also reached out directly in social media DMs minutes before publishing their memo with an official comment: “Fuck you,” plus the name of an individual not affiliated with FiftyPlusOne.
Their statement alleges that FiftyPlusOne, the New York Times, and other poll aggregators did not conduct appropriate vetting of their firm prior to aggregating their polls; this is false. We reached out to them to ask who they were and confirm the methodology statement on their website. We were given two names, Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. We were able to independently confirm that Sims had previous experience in the polling industry and reviewed their methodology statement in detail. It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different. Wedgewood operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm, including collecting money from donors to conduct crowd-funded polls, and sharing raw survey data (which we now have confirmed was fraudulent) with FiftyPlusOne on Oct. 15, 2026.
Who’s telling the truth? Your mileage may vary, but I’d tend to believe the established aggregator over the entity that spread fake numbers to the media for the last few months, and who only stopped because they were about to be exposed. It seems very clear that the Protection Racket Media has a very large demand for lefty-favoring poll numbers, and now two pollsters in this cycle have been exposed as dishonest suppliers to that market.
And this raises all sorts of questions about other pollsters, whether or not they’re outright cooking up their numbers. Pollsters only succeed when they get media exposure, and they increasingly only get that exposure by offering results that boost Democrats. This may be even more true of media-commissioned polls run by pollsters who understand the assignment. RealClearPolling didn’t include either Wedgewood or Median Strategies in its aggregation of polls for the primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, and yet the polls they did include had similarly ridiculous double-digit leads for both Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed barely beat Haley Stevens, and Hong outright lost her gubernatorial primary contest.
Wedgewood and Median Strategies might be outright frauds, but the rest of the polling industry has bigger problems than “how little scrutinization [sic] exists in media and public commentary.” The entire industry appears corrupted by the increasing bias and narrative manipulation in the American media market, which is not just misinforming its consumers of the status of the elections but also creating a false sense of unreliability in election results when supposedly predictive polls miss by a country mile. It’s all starting to meld into one giant propaganda industry, and Wedgewood fit into that much more closely than its organizers want to admit now.
Editor’s Note: Do you enjoy HotAir’s conservative reporting exposing the radical left and woke media? Support our work so we can keep bringing you the truth.
Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
