The Midterm Polling Scandal That Could Change Everything

An unbelievable story is breaking about the garbage polling in some areas.

A fake pollster called Wedgewood Polls is behind it. FiftyPlusOne, which is the revision of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight at the New York Times, reported, “Last week we received a credible tip from a trusted source that Wedgewood Polls might be faking data. We had received tips about Wedgewood in the past, but this particular tip had something crucial that others didn’t: Evidence.”

FiftyPlusOne investigated by running an identical poll to Wedgewood’s back-end data. They uncovered a bunch of red flags, including unnaturally clean sample data that lined up perfectly with Mississippi demographics, impossible user IDs, scrambled timestamps, and outdated serial numbers.

FiftyPlusOne reached out to Wedgewood Polls. FiftyPlusOne reported:

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.

FiftyPlusOne continued: 

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*ck you,” plus the name of an individual not affiliated with FiftyPlusOne.

Wedgewood Polls now admits that it was all fake; they’re claiming it was an experiment. They now claim they made up all these fraudulent polls to expose how bad the polling industry is.

I don’t buy this. It sounds like the excuse of the guy who’s been searching kiddie porn on his computer and then says that he was just doing it for research.

Wedgewood’s statement concludes, “Wedgewood Polling was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public. It was designed as a wake-up call. If a fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans can be integrated into major polling averages and cited by major news organizations, the standards for how polling data is vetted, aggregated and reported must change.”

The New York Times did cite Wedgewood 15 times between June and October. It was cited by Decision Desk 17 times in that same period.

They are trying to rerun all their polling averages because of this, but their polls always tend toward the Democrats. So if your polling average included an Abdul El-Sayed poll in Michigan that showed him up a week and a half ago plus six, they’re just making that up. They have Troy Jackson up four in Maine. That was included in the poll averages.

This makes a huge difference in some of these states that aren’t routinely polled. Maine doesn’t have a lot of polls, and if one of your four polls is totally made up by a Democrat oppo firm, that’s going to skew the poll average, which will generate people saying, “The race is already over. I’m not going to vote.”

It has a real impact.

You can see that all of these polls are basically biased toward Democrats. Even in heavily Republican districts, they’ll show Republicans up, but very, very, very slightly.

In other words, they are push-polling. And it has an impact.

They did a poll for the Democratic primary in Michigan with El-Sayed versus Haley Stevens versus Mallory McMorrow. It showed El-Sayed up seven. Virtually all of their push polling showed El-Sayed with a heavy lead in Michigan.

McMorrow, who dropped out, says she dropped out because of Wedgewood polling. She wrote 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.

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. … If this teaches us anything – DON’T GET COMPLACENT AND DON’T TRUST THE POLLS.

Meanwhile, another polling founder, Adam Carlson, says Wedgewood went to great lengths to lie privately about what they were doing.

He asked Wedgewood, “You only do online polls. Do you have any sponsors or is this all out of pocket for now?”

They answered, “Yes and no. We are starting with an initial $10,000 investment from me and are hoping to attract clients after getting a few polls out. We will also try to crowdfund a bit.”

“Republican clients, probably?” Carlson asked.

“While we currently use Dynata, we also incorporate data from the Bonfire voter file to help with our LV model and weighting. We plan to shift to RBS fielded with text to online once we get funding. Whoever will sponsor us, really? I myself am a progressive Democrat while my co-pollster is a Republican,” Wedgewood replied.

All of this means that if you are reading the polling data, the only thing you know about all of these elections is that they’re close. Also, if you want to affect the polling average while hiding in the crowd, all you have to do is change the sample sizes in various areas.

If you’re going to do that, you can easily skew the polling average.

Don’t fall for any op that tells you these elections are a foregone conclusion, or that the polling means a tsunami or anything like that.

It’s not what the polls say.

Additionally, right now you’re watching pollsters rush to group themselves, because if you’re a pollster and you have an outlier poll, you’ll often ditch it to avoid being the one with egg on your face if you’re wrong.

The only poll that matters is the one that includes actual voters who vote on Election Day, plus absentee ballots and mail-ins.

In short, the only poll that matters is the election itself.