By — Maria Ramirez Uribe Maria Ramirez Uribe Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-company-says-its-polls-were-fake-heres-what-happened Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter A company says its polls were fake. Here's what happened Politics Oct 21, 2026 6:50 PM EDT A national polling organization revealed on Tuesday that the vast majority of its data had been fabricated, saying it was an "experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities" of the modern political polling industry. Wedgewood Polling, whose polls had been cited by national news outlets, released the statement after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and election analysis site, questioned the veracity of its results. "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?" Wedgewood Polling said on X. "The short answer: Far too easy." Educate your inbox Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else. Enter your email address Subscribe Form error message goes here. Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm. FiftyPlusOne and The New York Times had included Wedgewood Polling data in their databases aggregating results from various polls. The organizations have since removed the data. MS NOW, Newsweek, Decision Desk HQ and Mediaite had also cited Wedgewood's polls. "The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation," Wedgewood said in its statement. Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University questioned Wedgewood Polling's statement that it had always been intended to be an experiment. Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. "Maybe so, but it's kind of suspicious that they happened to release this statement on the very day that they got caught," Gelman wrote in a blog post. A day after Wedgewood's admission, Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr said in a statement on X that TV networks could violate their regulatory obligations by airing "fake polls." "Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations," Carr wrote. Without citing evidence or specific polls, he added that there had been a "significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls" during this election season. Here's what to know about the incident, Carr's response and how polling works. What do we know about Wedgewood Polling? In its statement, Wedgewood Polling described itself as a "fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans." The organization's X account was opened in June 2026. Its website now displays an error message. FiftyPlusOne refuted Wedgewood's claim that its site and The New York Times had aggregated the polling data "without verifying the source, methodology, or underlying firm legitimacy." FiftyPlusOne and The New York Times said in their statements addressing Wedgewood Polling that before including the alleged data on their websites, the organizations had reached out to the polling firm with questions about the organization and its methods. According to FiftyPlusOne, the polling firm was run by Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. FiftyPlusOne wrote that it confirmed Sims had previous polling experience. "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," FiftyPlusOne said. Independent news organizations had previously raised alarms about Wedgewood Polling Several months back, Straight Arrow News and Urban Milwaukee published concerns about the veracity of Wedgewood Polling. Bruce Murphy, long-time editor and columnist for Urban Milwaukee, questioned the reliability of Wedgewood Polling in July and August, describing it as "a shady outfit." Murphy wrote that Wedgewood had published a poll showing Francesca Hong, a candidate for Wisconsin governor vying for the Democratic nomination, at 30%. Other polls, Murphy wrote, showed Hong with "far less of the vote." Hong lost the primary. Straight Arrow News pointed out that Wedgewood Polling's website didn't include employee names, a phone number or an address. The news organization said it reached out to the polling firm, which confirmed they were a "two-person shop" but declined to reveal their identities or appear on camera. "We understand that this decision can naturally raise skepticism," the firm reportedly told Straight Arrow News in a statement. It cited "recent concerns surrounding organizations such as Median Strategies." That fraudulent polling organization admitted in August that it had also faked results as a "short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification." Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. Senate candidate in Michigan says fake polling hurt her campaign Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, suspended her campaign to become a U.S. senator in July, about a month before the state's primary that progressive Abdul El-Sayed won. In an X post on Tuesday, McMorrow detailed what she described as the impact of Wedgewood's "experiment." McMorrow wrote that a Wedgewood poll in June showed her "plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals)." As a result, she said "donations dried up" and "volunteers were devastated." "Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken," McMorrow wrote. "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." Beyond Wedgewood's fake polls, legitimate polling in Michigan's Democratic primary differed greatly from the election's results. Several polls showed El-Sayed with a comfortable double-digit lead over moderate Haley Stevens. However, he beat her by only one percentage point. Courtney Kennedy, senior vice president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos, attributed the discrepancy to polling methodology. Polls in Michigan were largely conducted in a method known as text-to-web, where pollsters text voters a link to take an online survey. The method is cheap, Kennedy told PBS News in August. "You get what you pay for," she said. WATCH: Why primary polls appear to be so inaccurate this year Text-to-web was effective at reaching progressive, young voters but struggled to reach moderate voters, she added. In contrast, a poll conducted with phone interviews did better at reaching Stevens voters and representing moderate voters. "How the polls were done in Michigan really told the tale," Kennedy said. "In that state they paid the price for using those less expensive methods." Trump and Carr have blasted 'fake polls' Without naming Wedgewood or Median Strategies, Carr on Wednesday bashed news organizations for airing what he described as "fake polls" without "regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis." Carr said the FCC "takes these issues seriously" and that broadcasters are prohibited "from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes." FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez disagreed with Carr's statement. "Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong," she said Wednesday on X. "FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith." Watch the clip in the player above. According to FCC guidelines, news distortion "must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report." And the policy "makes a crucial distinction between deliberate distortion and mere inaccuracy or difference of opinion." "As a result, broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report," the FCC's website says. "Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable." This isn't the first time Carr has threatened broadcasters over publishing polling information. In September, Carr told Fox News that "the FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with respect to not airing fake polls." Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has long criticized polls that don't favor him or his party. WATCH: How the Kansas Senate race became surprisingly competitive "Look, the polls are fake," Trump told reporters Monday, when talking about campaigning in Kansas, where polls show Republican Sen. Roger Marshall is facing a shockingly close race with Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. How should polling work? Polls are intended to be a snapshot that estimate how people feel at a specific moment in time. They aren't meant to forecast what will happen in the future. Kennedy told PBS News in August that polls need to be vetted like any other source. "If you're curious if a poll is real, have you heard of the pollster? Do they have a track record? That's a big tell," she said. Kennedy suggested investigating whether pollsters are named, whether they have credentials and whether they're forthcoming about their methods. "The more rigorous polls tend to be more transparent about how they're done," she said. READ MORE: What polling does — and doesn't — tell us To reliably estimate how people feel, polls need to include a representative sample of the population. "In probability-based polling, the sample is drawn so that every person has a mathematically determined, non-zero chance of being selected," pollster Lee Miringoff, who directs the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, told PBS News in 2022. PBS News partners with Marist and NPR on regular, national polls. WATCH: An inside look at how the PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll is conducted Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. To ensure the samples are demographically representative, pollsters then adjust their results in a mathematical process known as weighting. Polls also include margins of error to illustrate how close an estimate is to reflecting the results if every person in a group had been interviewed. Polls that don't include a margin of error risk not resembling the larger population, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2024, Kennedy told PBS News that even though polling can give us "a high-level read of how the public feels about a major issue of the day," it cannot predict the winner of a competitive election. "I love polling," she said. "But it's just not a precise enough tool to do that." A free press is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Support trusted journalism and civil dialogue. Donate now By — Maria Ramirez Uribe Maria Ramirez Uribe
A national polling organization revealed on Tuesday that the vast majority of its data had been fabricated, saying it was an "experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities" of the modern political polling industry. Wedgewood Polling, whose polls had been cited by national news outlets, released the statement after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and election analysis site, questioned the veracity of its results. "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?" Wedgewood Polling said on X. "The short answer: Far too easy." Educate your inbox Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else. Enter your email address Subscribe Form error message goes here. Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm. FiftyPlusOne and The New York Times had included Wedgewood Polling data in their databases aggregating results from various polls. The organizations have since removed the data. MS NOW, Newsweek, Decision Desk HQ and Mediaite had also cited Wedgewood's polls. "The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation," Wedgewood said in its statement. Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University questioned Wedgewood Polling's statement that it had always been intended to be an experiment. Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. "Maybe so, but it's kind of suspicious that they happened to release this statement on the very day that they got caught," Gelman wrote in a blog post. A day after Wedgewood's admission, Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr said in a statement on X that TV networks could violate their regulatory obligations by airing "fake polls." "Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations," Carr wrote. Without citing evidence or specific polls, he added that there had been a "significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls" during this election season. Here's what to know about the incident, Carr's response and how polling works. What do we know about Wedgewood Polling? In its statement, Wedgewood Polling described itself as a "fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans." The organization's X account was opened in June 2026. Its website now displays an error message. FiftyPlusOne refuted Wedgewood's claim that its site and The New York Times had aggregated the polling data "without verifying the source, methodology, or underlying firm legitimacy." FiftyPlusOne and The New York Times said in their statements addressing Wedgewood Polling that before including the alleged data on their websites, the organizations had reached out to the polling firm with questions about the organization and its methods. According to FiftyPlusOne, the polling firm was run by Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. FiftyPlusOne wrote that it confirmed Sims had previous polling experience. "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," FiftyPlusOne said. Independent news organizations had previously raised alarms about Wedgewood Polling Several months back, Straight Arrow News and Urban Milwaukee published concerns about the veracity of Wedgewood Polling. Bruce Murphy, long-time editor and columnist for Urban Milwaukee, questioned the reliability of Wedgewood Polling in July and August, describing it as "a shady outfit." Murphy wrote that Wedgewood had published a poll showing Francesca Hong, a candidate for Wisconsin governor vying for the Democratic nomination, at 30%. Other polls, Murphy wrote, showed Hong with "far less of the vote." Hong lost the primary. Straight Arrow News pointed out that Wedgewood Polling's website didn't include employee names, a phone number or an address. The news organization said it reached out to the polling firm, which confirmed they were a "two-person shop" but declined to reveal their identities or appear on camera. "We understand that this decision can naturally raise skepticism," the firm reportedly told Straight Arrow News in a statement. It cited "recent concerns surrounding organizations such as Median Strategies." That fraudulent polling organization admitted in August that it had also faked results as a "short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification." Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. Senate candidate in Michigan says fake polling hurt her campaign Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, suspended her campaign to become a U.S. senator in July, about a month before the state's primary that progressive Abdul El-Sayed won. In an X post on Tuesday, McMorrow detailed what she described as the impact of Wedgewood's "experiment." McMorrow wrote that a Wedgewood poll in June showed her "plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals)." As a result, she said "donations dried up" and "volunteers were devastated." "Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken," McMorrow wrote. "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." Beyond Wedgewood's fake polls, legitimate polling in Michigan's Democratic primary differed greatly from the election's results. Several polls showed El-Sayed with a comfortable double-digit lead over moderate Haley Stevens. However, he beat her by only one percentage point. Courtney Kennedy, senior vice president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos, attributed the discrepancy to polling methodology. Polls in Michigan were largely conducted in a method known as text-to-web, where pollsters text voters a link to take an online survey. The method is cheap, Kennedy told PBS News in August. "You get what you pay for," she said. WATCH: Why primary polls appear to be so inaccurate this year Text-to-web was effective at reaching progressive, young voters but struggled to reach moderate voters, she added. In contrast, a poll conducted with phone interviews did better at reaching Stevens voters and representing moderate voters. "How the polls were done in Michigan really told the tale," Kennedy said. "In that state they paid the price for using those less expensive methods." Trump and Carr have blasted 'fake polls' Without naming Wedgewood or Median Strategies, Carr on Wednesday bashed news organizations for airing what he described as "fake polls" without "regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis." Carr said the FCC "takes these issues seriously" and that broadcasters are prohibited "from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes." FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez disagreed with Carr's statement. "Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong," she said Wednesday on X. "FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith." Watch the clip in the player above. According to FCC guidelines, news distortion "must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report." And the policy "makes a crucial distinction between deliberate distortion and mere inaccuracy or difference of opinion." "As a result, broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report," the FCC's website says. "Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable." This isn't the first time Carr has threatened broadcasters over publishing polling information. In September, Carr told Fox News that "the FCC may put guidance out soon to remind broadcasters about their obligations with respect to not airing fake polls." Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has long criticized polls that don't favor him or his party. WATCH: How the Kansas Senate race became surprisingly competitive "Look, the polls are fake," Trump told reporters Monday, when talking about campaigning in Kansas, where polls show Republican Sen. Roger Marshall is facing a shockingly close race with Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton. How should polling work? Polls are intended to be a snapshot that estimate how people feel at a specific moment in time. They aren't meant to forecast what will happen in the future. Kennedy told PBS News in August that polls need to be vetted like any other source. "If you're curious if a poll is real, have you heard of the pollster? Do they have a track record? That's a big tell," she said. Kennedy suggested investigating whether pollsters are named, whether they have credentials and whether they're forthcoming about their methods. "The more rigorous polls tend to be more transparent about how they're done," she said. READ MORE: What polling does — and doesn't — tell us To reliably estimate how people feel, polls need to include a representative sample of the population. "In probability-based polling, the sample is drawn so that every person has a mathematically determined, non-zero chance of being selected," pollster Lee Miringoff, who directs the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, told PBS News in 2022. PBS News partners with Marist and NPR on regular, national polls. WATCH: An inside look at how the PBS News/NPR/Marist Poll is conducted Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above. To ensure the samples are demographically representative, pollsters then adjust their results in a mathematical process known as weighting. Polls also include margins of error to illustrate how close an estimate is to reflecting the results if every person in a group had been interviewed. Polls that don't include a margin of error risk not resembling the larger population, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2024, Kennedy told PBS News that even though polling can give us "a high-level read of how the public feels about a major issue of the day," it cannot predict the winner of a competitive election. "I love polling," she said. "But it's just not a precise enough tool to do that." A free press is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Support trusted journalism and civil dialogue. Donate now