My RedState colleague Ward Clark has already exposed the (fake) polling firm, Wedgewood Polls. This company “not only fabricated data that was folded into aggregates… but may have actually caused one Senate primary candidate to drop out of the race by presenting phony numbers.” This is in reference to Democrat Mallory McMorrow, who was the third wheel in the Michigan primary won by MB-lover Abdul El-Sayed. The Wedgewood poll that destroyed her campaign was in June, and it showed McMorrow plummeting into single digits, which she states was at odds with her own internals.
This prompted her donations to dry up, her volunteers to give up, and reporters to hound her with calls to drop out. Wedgewood was – surprise, surprise – a far-left polling firm, which is why it acted to favor El-Sayed. And overall, Wedgewood’s “made-up data appears to have mostly skewed to favor Democrats” in its general ballot tests.
Considering some of my earlier columns on polling and how it can lie, I feel the need and the desire to comment further on this situation.
I think Real Clear Politics deserves some applause here, as (perhaps) the only aggregator not to fall for Wedgewood. The New York Times did – no surprise – as did Fifty Plus One (G. Elliot Morris), the old 538 team that was released by ABC News, and Nate Silver’s (whom I like to call Nate Fool’s Gold) Silver Bulletin. I am gratified to see that my decision to focus solely on RCP has been ratified.
It is important to remember that this is not the first time that a pollster has gone belly-up because of deception. Median Strategies, another fake left-wing pollster, was revealed earlier in 2026. Also recently, “another polling company took money from a candidate without disclosing and then simply switched votes in their poll to give that candidate an edge,” and “yet another polling company took money from that same candidate without disclosing.” Back in 2010, yet another left-wing pollster, Research 2000, was also discovered to be fraudulent.
Clearly, this shows that at least some left-wing pollsters are willing to fudge their numbers to get their desired results.
Considering this, what do we make of some of the other big polling issues? It has frequently been alleged, by me, based on the insight of many others, that the current public polling is biased in favor of Democrats. Pollsters seem unable, or simply unwilling, to control for the proportion of leftist, white, educated Democrats, especially women and the young, whom they survey. Further, there is a separate problem of their undersampling of right-wing voters. All of this seems to happen pretty much every two years, during federal elections, going back to at least 2016.
Based on the blatant fraud of Wedgewood et. al, is it so impossible to believe that some of the other left-leaning polling firms are also deliberately using their sampling techniques to stack the deck for the Democrats? I don’t think so.
Now, does this mean that everything these firms produce in their polls is total junk? I also don’t think so. President Trump’s RealClearPolitics approval is at 38.3 percent, with 60.5 percent disapproving. The congressional generic vote shows the Democrats have an 8.3-point margin, 50.4 percent to 42.1 percent. This public polling is in “blue wave” territory. There would have to be a lot of bias in a large majority of these polls to get to a GOP sweep of the 2026 elections.
But, if there is a deliberate bias being knowingly peddled by these firms, it is immensely dishonest of them.
Also, even a two- to three percent conscious underestimation of the GOP’s numbers in the polling could be crucial to depressing GOP turnout in the battle for the Senate. As I have long belabored, the Democrats need a net pickup of four seats to win control. Only two Republican seats, Maine and North Carolina, are in competitive states. The other 20 GOP seats are in states Donald Trump won by double digits. Making things even worse for the Democrats, “[i]n every election for both House and Senate since 1998, polls have overestimated Democrats by more in red states than blue states (and vice versa)!” {Note: emphasis original to linked X post.)
Based on the exposed fraud of these pollsters, and the potential for more fraud in the polling industry, I think that an honest pollster would make real efforts to be as above board as possible from now on. They would immediately attempt to make corrections to their polling sampling, to try and get a more accurate picture of the electorate. Once again, I guess “We’ll (Just Have to) See What Happens.”
But I am not going to hold my breath on this one.