Wedgewood Polling, an unaffiliated firm that described itself as an election survey company, admitted on Tuesday night to using “fabricated numbers” for an experimental project designed to illustrate vulnerabilities in the modern political polling industry.
The organization’s misleading polls were cited by progressive candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed during his Michigan Democratic primary race against state Senator Mallory McMorrow and U.S. Representative Haley Stevens, D-Michigan. The firm was also referenced in a Wisconsin gubernatorial race where it showed socialist Francesca Hong leading Republican candidate Rep. Tom Tiffany.
The deceptive numbers suggested Hong led other Democratic contenders by nearly 30 points in the Wisconsin primary, though she narrowly lost to David Crowley.
Mallory McMorrow stated that the fake polling data caused her campaign to suffer significant setbacks, including dried-up donations and distressed volunteers, prompting her withdrawal from the race on July 5. She noted the polls showed her “plummeting into single digits” (discrepant with internal campaign data).
Wedgewood Polling claims it conducted only one legitimate poll in Nebraska but admitted to fabricating numbers for its project. The group stated that its fabricated numbers were treated as credible by major polling aggregators, including The New York Times and VoteHub, without formal credentials or real data.
The incident follows a pattern of polling inaccuracies. In 2016, Democratic consultant Pat Caddell accused Reuters of rigging polls to flip a Donald Trump lead over Hillary Clinton into the reverse. Research has also found that more than 3,000 senatorial polls going back years regularly overstated Democratic candidates’ support.