Wedgewood Polls posted on X Tuesday night that it fabricated its data throughout the 2026 election cycle, claiming it was done as a “social experiment” intended to spark reform of the industry.
The statement said in part that the individuals behind Wedgewood conducted “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry. We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutiny exists in media and public commentary? The short answer: Far too easy.”
Wedgewood took credit for at least 18 polls this year in which the data was cited by numerous polling aggregators such as the left-wing FiftyPlusOne, Decision Desk HQ, and the New York Times.
Among the races in which Wedgewood’s faked data had material impact was the Michigan Democrat Senate primary, which led to one of the candidates dropping out of the contest.
Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the race soon after Wedgewood reported she fell to just 9 percent in the three-way race with Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens, blasted the group in a lengthy post on X.
“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,” she wrote. “Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in — for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.”
Other states affected by Wedgewood were Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, and Texas.
Elsewhere in Wedgewood’s statement, it said:
Despite having no history, formal credentials, or real data behind the vast majority of our releases, Wedgewood Polling was added to major polling aggregators, and repeatedly treated as a legitimate data source. Our fabricated numbers were given instant credibility across national media platforms — including being cited on air and in reporting by outlets such as MS NOW. The ease with which unverified figures were absorbed into mainstream political narratives highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.
Wedgewood is at least the second “polling firm” to admit to being entirely fake.
In August, an unknown company called Median Strategies published polls of the Democrat primary for governor in Wisconsin, the gubernatorial race in Nevada, and the mayoral race in Los Angeles, using the same “social experiment” explanation for passing off fake polling data as legitimate.
The larger issue with Wedgewood’s faked data is the overall lack of rigor in polling and the media narratives driven through its use. The industry has failed to accurately describe the American electorate, missing voters especially on the Right. This systemic failure failed to capture support for President Donald Trump dating back to 2016, and the ecosystem that’s developed around so-called “data journalism” spends more time trying to dissect horserace topics than fairly covering issues voters care about.
Follow Matt Mercer on X: @mattmercer.
