Polls are supposed to measure a race, not steer it.
But two outfits already confessed to cooking up numbers during the 2026 cycle. Democrats loved what those numbers said.
And a third pollster just vanished from the internet hours after investigators came knocking.
A Polling Firm Pulled Its Own Plug After One Phone Call
The firm goes by SoCal Strategies. For a couple of years, its surveys floated around political social media and landed in the averages cable news anchors quote every night.
Then FiftyPlusOne, the polling aggregator founded by data analyst G Elliott Morris, started asking questions. Its researchers published a lengthy report questioning several SoCal surveys and, maybe more important, questioning who actually runs the place.
The paper trail gets strange fast. According to the report, a man named Jack Sims registered the firm in Florida in 2025 and once worked there. Sims also turned up in FiftyPlusOne’s earlier investigation into Wedgewood Polls, the outfit that admitted it made up its numbers.
In May, Sims dissolved the business entity and left behind a note typed in all capital letters: “ITS [sic] TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.”
But the polls kept coming. SoCal put out three more surveys after that filing.
FiftyPlusOne’s team spoke by phone with someone who identified himself as Wilson Rochford, a former Probolsky Research intern the firm listed as its lead pollster. The aggregator noted allegations that “Rochford was not involved at all, and that other people, possibly Sims, were fraudulently using his name and profile in connection with Wedgewood.”
Nobody has proven those allegations. FiftyPlusOne itself said it couldn’t say for certain who was on the other end of that call, and the man on the phone flatly denied any problems with the data.
Then the aggregator tried to reach Rochford through his student email. Within hours, SoCal’s website, its X account, and its Substack page all went dark, according to FiftyPlusOne and the Washington Post.
FiftyPlusOne yanked two SoCal polls from its database, pointing out that those releases looked materially different from the firm’s usual format and lacked the full crosstabs SoCal normally posted. The aggregator now refuses to collect any new SoCal surveys, though it kept most of the firm’s older work.
Two Confessions Came First, and the Numbers Kept Leaning Left
SoCal hasn’t confessed to anything. And nobody has shown that its two disputed polls favored either party.
But the company it keeps tells a story.
Wedgewood Polls came clean only after FiftyPlusOne prepared to expose it. The outfit called its whole operation “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry.” When the aggregator first asked about discrepancies, Wedgewood reportedly fired back with a two-word insult that can’t run in a family publication.
The New York Times scrubbed 15 Wedgewood polls from its averages. Decision Desk HQ tossed 17.
Now look at what those fake numbers said. Veteran Republican pollster Jim McLaughlin noted that starting in June, Wedgewood handed Democrats the lead in every battleground it touched, from Texas and Michigan to Georgia, Maine, Ohio, and Kansas, and he concluded the phony data aimed to promote Democrats. Nate Silver also spotted a slight Democrat lean and called the fabricated surveys “a bit more narrative-shaping” than earlier frauds.
In Michigan, the damage reached real people. A June Wedgewood poll put far-left candidate Abdul El-Sayed at 46 percent in the Democrat Senate primary and state Senator Mallory McMorrow at a dismal 9 percent. El-Sayed’s campaign cited Wedgewood’s numbers along the way.
McMorrow quit the race in early July and later said the fake survey dried up her donations. Other legitimate polls showed her struggling too, so the phony one didn’t act alone. But it sure didn’t help.
Median Strategies came before both. In August, that outfit called its own work a social experiment and announced that it “has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls.” Its surveys had Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass cruising toward a second term and Democratic Socialists of America member Francesca Hong leading the Wisconsin Democrat governor’s primary by roughly 20 points.
Hong lost to David Crowley by a whisker. Bass, for her part, had already celebrated her fake lead on X: “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!”
Phony Numbers Never Stay Inside the Spreadsheet
Some analysts insist nobody has proven partisan intent behind any of this. Fair enough. The people behind Wedgewood and Median still haven’t stepped forward, and motives remain murky.
But intent and effect are two different animals. A poll showing a Democrat up six moves money, headlines, and volunteer hours, no matter what the guy typing the numbers had in mind.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr saw the pattern before SoCal ever went dark. He warned that there “has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls” during the 2026 cycle.
Suppression polls run on a simple premise. Convince Republican voters their candidate is toast, and some of them stay home. Convince donors a seat is lost, and the checks stop. Convince reporters a Democrat has momentum, and the coverage practically writes itself.
Conservatives have watched this movie before. The American Association for Public Opinion Research found that 2020 national polls posted their worst miss in 40 years, with the error running almost entirely in Joe Biden’s favor. And in 2024, the final PBS/NPR/Marist survey had Kamala Harris up four points nationally, as the Federalist pointed out. Voters handed Donald Trump a decisive win anyway.
Those were real pollsters making real mistakes. Now the business has to worry about pollsters who may not exist at all.
And the aggregators deserve a hard look of their own. Wedgewood bragged that it had “no history, formal credentials, or real data” behind most of its releases, yet it slipped into the New York Times average, FiftyPlusOne, and VoteHub. FiftyPlusOne disputes that it skipped proper vetting. Still, the people whose whole job is sniffing out fakes got fooled.
FiftyPlusOne more or less admitted the problem is growing: “It’s getting easier to conduct low-quality polls.” Cheap online survey tools make the con easier every year, and a slick logo plus a Substack page apparently passes for credentials in some newsrooms.
So what comes next? Three outfits, two admitted and one under a cloud, in a single cycle, with the midterms still ahead. Expect a flood of late surveys showing Democrats surging in places they haven’t won in decades. Some will be legitimate. Some might come from a firm nobody can find.
Readers have a simple defense. Check who ran the poll, how long the firm has been around, and whether anyone can track down an actual human being behind it.
Because when a pollster disappears the moment somebody asks for a phone number, the numbers were never worth much to begin with.
Sources: Mediaite, “Polling Company Goes Dark as Investigative Report Suggests They’re Yet Another Fake”; FiftyPlusOne, “More pollster funny business uncovered by FiftyPlusOne”; Axios, “Election polling rocked by a new fake data scandal”; The Hill, “Fake polls fooled the political world. Now the midterms face a trust crisis”; Newsweek, “Failed Senate Candidate Says Fake Poll ‘Killed’ Her Campaign”; Newsweek, “Nate Silver Forecast Shifts Toward Republicans After Fake Polls Removed”; Yahoo News, “Wedgewood Fake Polls, Real Consequences”; Fox News, “Democrats furious as pollster boosting far-left candidates admits fabricating surveys”; Michigan Advance, “McMorrow says fake polling ‘experiment’ hurt campaign, eroded voter trust”; Breitbart, “Polling Firm Admits to Fake Data, Says It Was ‘Social Experiment’”; The National News Desk, “Polling firm closes after releasing fake election surveys for ‘social experiment’”; FOX 5 San Diego, “Poll showing LA Mayor Karen Bass leading Nithya Raman by a wide margin was fake”; The Federalist, on Median Strategies; News 4 San Antonio, “Polling firm disappears amid media questioning surveys, employees”; American Association for Public Opinion Research, Task Force on 2020 Pre-Election Polling.