Fake Polling Firm's "Social Experiment" May Have Derailed Real Political Campaigns

A Manufactured Crisis in American Polling

Just days before the 2026 midterm elections, a bombshell admission has rattled the world of political polling. A pollster admitted this week to using fabricated data in its surveys that were picked up by leading publications across the U.S., claiming the stunt was an "experimental project" intended to showcase the "vulnerabilities" of the polling industry. The firm, called Wedgewood Polls, didn't just fool a few fringe websites — it fooled some of the biggest names in American journalism.

Wedgewood's polls had been used by multiple national outlets for their midterm reporting, including the New York Times, Newsweek, MS NOW, and Politico. The Times, which cited around 15 Wedgewood polls between June and October, has since removed the data from its stories. Overall, between 15 and 17 polls fabricated by Wedgewood had been cited by various sites before being removed.

Wedgewood described its operation as "an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry," and said it was "far too easy" for their polls to "gain traction" and "be taken seriously." The group's X account has since been deleted, and TIME's email to Wedgewood Polls bounced back.

How the Scheme Unraveled

The announcement came after Wedgewood was asked to comment on the findings of an investigation by FiftyPlusOne, a website founded by former staff of the data-journalism site FiveThirtyEight. Researchers obtained Wedgewood's raw data from a Mississippi Senate survey and compared its respondent identifiers with genuine records from Pollfish, the platform Wedgewood claimed to use — and the identifiers and transaction timestamps displayed patterns incompatible with authentic interviews.

When Wedgewood was asked about the data discrepancies, FiftyPlusOne screenshotted the reply: "F--k you." Soon after, Wedgewood posted a statement on X saying it "wanted to test" whether an "entirely fabricated polling firm" could "gain traction." It said it had no real data behind the vast majority of its releases, but maintained that one crowdfunded Nebraska poll was legitimate.

Nate Silver, a prominent polling aggregator and founder of Silver Bulletin, announced that he had banned Wedgewood from his aggregation site. Silver's midterm elections forecast shifted slightly toward Republicans after he removed the fake polls, which he said had been roughly one point more favorable to Democrats than the broader consensus.

Real Candidates, Real Damage

For all the talk of "experiments," the consequences for actual candidates were very real. Wedgewood was among several firms that released data during the 2026 Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate showing state Sen. Mallory McMorrow trailing her opponents by a wide margin and Abdul El-Sayed — the eventual nominee — well ahead of his chief rival, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.

McMorrow, the unsuccessful Michigan Democratic Senate candidate who dropped out before her primary, said a fake Wedgewood poll showing her crashing to single-digit support "dried up" donations, "devastated" volunteers, and led to numerous calls to exit the race. McMorrow suspended her campaign on July 5, just one month before the primaries. Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist who ran a SuperPAC that supported McMorrow, claimed the fake poll had been "used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million."

A Systemic Warning With No Easy Fix

In another fraudulent polling operation uncovered in August, a company called Median Strategies fabricated polls for races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California and similarly called the ploy a "social experiment." The pattern is alarming: fake firms are finding it disturbingly easy to enter a system that millions of voters, donors, and journalists rely on to understand elections.

Veteran party professionals from both major political parties are incensed. Some Democrats think Wedgewood was a Republican front group. Some Republicans believe the reverse. The consensus is that these fake pollsters damaged the democratic process and may have committed crimes.

With the midterms now days away, the damage is already done — and the deeper question is whether the polling industry will take serious steps to raise its vetting standards, or whether the next fake firm will find the door just as wide open. Nate Silver wrote in his newsletter that vetting was not thorough enough across the industry, and that there were real risks from fake polls looking ahead to future elections. For voters trying to make sense of the political landscape, that's a sobering reality to sit with.