In a press release released on October 20, 2026, Wedgewood Polls admitted to spreading fraudulent election polling data to national news networks. Wedgewood Polls fabricated statistics about the midterm elections in and fed them to the media. National news outlets, including The New York Times, VoteHub, FiftyPlusOne, and MS NOW, cited the made-up statistics as facts. The data has since been pulled.
FiftyPlusOne investigated Wedgewood Polls, suspecting the data to have been fabricated. In response to FiftyPlusOne’s questioning, Wedgewood Polls released a statement on X and sent the statement to FiftyPlusOne with the message: “F— you.”
Wedgewood claims they were conducting a “social experiment” designed to “demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” The fake data pertained to races in Michigan, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, Iowa, and Nevada. After some of their fake polls were included in major polling aggregators, the group attempted to raise money through GoFundMe for a poll on the Nebraska Senate and Governor’s races. Wedgewood raised $500 from 14 donors. ElectIndex, which promoted the GoFundMe, promised to pay back anyone who donated to Wedgewood, stating, “ElectIndex did not conduct the Wedgewood Nebraska poll. We promoted its GoFundMe, and we now have reason to believe the poll was not real. We’re refunding every donor in full ourselves.”
New York Times issued an Editor’s Note on October 21, 2026, on its Poll Tracker page after removing the fraudulent data. The note explained, “In all, The Times’s poll tracker included 15 polls released by Wedgewood between June and October, some of which included multiple races. All of the group’s releases covered state- or congressional district-level races; the group’s polls were never included in the tracker or average of President Trump’s approval rating or of the national polls tracking overall preference for control of Congress.”
NYT also pointed to another example of fraudulent polling from earlier this year: “Another group calling itself Median Strategies admitted to fabricating poll results. Those results were never included in The Times’s trackers because the group did not respond to our questions about its methodology.”
Head of Data Science at VoteHub, Zachary Donnini, posted on X in response to Wedgewood’s statement, saying the group “struck me as nice kids with at least some understanding of polling, but obviously no professional experience.” Despite recognizing their lack of professional experience, Donnini admitted VoteHub “assigned them a D grade and included their polling data on our site.”
Adam Carlson from Zenith Research posted screenshots of a conversation he had with the fake pollsters, stating, “They went to great lengths to lie to me privately.”
In their report of Wedgewood’s fraudulent data scheme, FiftyPlusOne points to more examples of polling misinformation: “But the wrongdoing we have uncovered on the part of Wedgewood Polls is just the most recent in a series of cases of pollsters manipulating and fabricating data. Earlier this year, FiftyPlusOne found a small firm in Florida that admitted to manipulating respondent-level data so results matched the pollster’s independent assessment of the race. In another case, one individual told The Guardian this summer that he outright fabricated polling results in multiple races as part of a “social experiment” about how social media is quick to pick up any “polling” data, regardless of its legitimacy.”
Fabricated polling data is not a new tactic for influencing elections and law-making. In 2013, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who performed 75,000 abortions, admitted that the pro-abortion industry simply made up statistics to push its narrative: “We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.”
The Wedgewood “social experiment” is only another example of that tactic, but one that was not nearly as successful as the self-fulfilling lie from the abortion industry.
