This week, polling firm Wedgewood Polls was exposed for fabricating data and subsequently shut down. The company had claimed to survey competitive primary and general election races, with its results feeding into prominent polling averages, from Decision Desk HQ to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin Substack. But the timing was suspicious: the announcement came only after an investigation by polling outlet FiftyPlusOne exposed it as fraudulent.
The scandal, breaking barely two weeks before voters go to the polls for the Midterms, follows the Median Strategies scandal in August, when another purported polling operation was revealed to be faking its data. Both Median and Wedgewood claimed their polling was merely a “social experiment” designed to show the weakness of safeguards against malicious actors in the polling industry. Many professional pollsters, like myself, rolled their eyes at this.
