With the 2026 midterms only days away, a lot of people are looking at a lot of polling, trying to glean what data we can from people carrying out what isn't exactly an exact science. Polling on candidates and issues often consists of talking to people who aren't yet sure what they think about those candidates or issues, and polling questions can also be angled to provoke a certain response; this is called "push polling," and that's more propagandizing than information-gathering.

It's not often, though, that a pollster cops to being an outright fake, and to having simply made up their "data" out of whole cloth. But that seems to be what has happened with an outfit called Wedgewood Polls, who not only fabricated data that was folded into aggregates like RealClear Polling, but may have actually caused one Senate primary candidate to drop out of the race by presenting phony numbers.

As someone once said, this is a big freaking deal. And we know about it thanks to FiftyPlusOne. (Language alert.)

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood Polls, a self-professed polling firm, with a request for comment on an investigation we had conducted into their alleged survey research. They did not respond to our request, but instead posted a public statement on social media admitting that they had been fabricating data. They also reached out directly in social media DMs minutes before publishing their memo with an official comment: “F*** you,” plus the name of an individual not affiliated with FiftyPlusOne.

Their statement alleges that FiftyPlusOne, the New York Times, and other poll aggregators did not conduct appropriate vetting of their firm prior to aggregating their polls; this is false. We reached out to them to ask who they were and confirm the methodology statement on their website. We were given two names, Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. We were able to independently confirm that Sims had previous experience in the polling industry and reviewed their methodology statement in detail. It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different. Wedgewood operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm, including collecting money from donors to conduct crowd-funded polls, and sharing raw survey data (which we now have confirmed was fraudulent) with FiftyPlusOne on Oct. 15, 2026.

Wedgewood operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm. It was not and is not. It was faking it all along, and its fakery was far-reaching enough to cause a Michigan candidate for the United States Senate, Mallory McMorrow, who ran against Abdul El-Sayed in the primary, to drop out of the race. She writes:

As one of the candidates featured in these polls - the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) - here's the impact of this "experiment" 

- Donations dried up 

- Volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do 

- Reporters hounded me with calls to drop out

To call this act by Wedgewood a breach of trust with American voters is a massive understatement. This appears to be a deliberate and pernicious attempt to skew elections, to skew voter perceptions, with information that was just plain faked. 

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So, why, we might ask, would they do this? It seems they were trying to make some kind of a ham-handed point. Wedgewood has issued a press statement, which, under "Why We Did This," states:

Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public's trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverified, low-quality methodology. We wanted to test a simply hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling form to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization (sic) exists in media and public commentary? 

The short answer: Far too easy.

Well, obviously, they aren't wrong. Here's the entire press statement.

As for their intent to expose how little "scrutinization" of the polling industry is concerned, well, they certainly did that. And, amazingly, their made-up data appears to have mostly skewed to favor Democrats. And there's the catch: As previously noted, Wedgewood came out with its "Here's Why" statement, but  they only did so after FiftyPlusOne blew the lid off the whole affair. Would they have carried on the charade otherwise? And if so, to what end?

One major media outlet has a seriously red face this morning:

Granted, it's been a while since anyone to the political right of Raul Castro has had much reason to take the New York Times too seriously, but this is really another Baby Ruth bar in the swimming pool of the publication that once claimed to be America's newspaper of record. The real question, though, is this: how much did this tilt the various polling averages? RealClear Polling's averages, for example; those of us in the business, as well as plenty of people concerned about politics (and if you're reading this, then it's a safe bet that applies to you) look at the polling aggregates daily, out of the sake of curiosity if nothing else. Any one day's numbers aren't always relevant, but trends can be. But now we have this wild card, and it's not yet known to what extent "Wedgewood" numbers were factored in, how much they may have skewed the averages, and how outfits like RealClear Polling are backing Wedgewood's fake data out of their calculations.

So, what's the likely outcome of all this? Well, that remains to be seen. The only poll that really counts, after all, is the actual election, and we have reason to think that the Republicans are being underpolled, possibly seriously so. And Democrats, who no doubt have their own internal polling numbers, are pulling out all the stops, although some of those stops may be pulling themselves out. 

Our role in this affair remains the same: The polls can be interesting, they can reveal some trends. I know I have a lot of fun diving into polling and, as I taught corporations to do for twenty-plus years as a consultant, try to extract information from data. But the only poll that counts is the election, and now, as early and mail-in voting has already started, is where we have to set our concerns aside and go vote. The revelation of this fakery makes that all the more apparent. 

Vote! Vote! Vote!