After election analysis website FiftyPlusOne submitted an inquiry to Wedgewood Polls regarding the authenticity of its data and methodologies, the pollster put out a statement across social media on Tuesday, saying it had been conducting a test to show "how easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?" In the statement, which has since been deleted, the group claimed it had been “far too easy” to distribute false data and insisted it "highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”
TIME's email to Wedgewood Polls bounced back.
“It's very troubling that we've had two examples of this within a very short period of time during election campaigns, creating a lot of problems for legitimate polling,” says Michael Traugott, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Michigan, who previously served as president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).
The polling group called itself a “fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans” in its statement. Its X account, which contained many of its polls, no longer exists.
FiftyPlusOne said in a public statement that Wedgewood “operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm” by collecting money from donors to carry out crowd-funded polls and share its survey data.
“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,” FiftyPlusOne said regarding Sims.
Senate candidate in Michigan says fake polling damaged her campaign
The polling scandal has sparked a flurry of reactions within the politics and government sector, with one former Senate hopeful claiming the numbers circulated by Wedgewood contributed to the collapse of her campaign.
Wedgewood released polling on June 29 that placed McMorrow as having the support of only 9% of registered voters, leaving her trailing behind Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. Other polls also showed McMorrow in third place with single digits. A Susquehanna Polling survey conducted June 9 to 14 put McMorrow at 9%, although 49% of Democratic primary voters surveyed were undecided. A July 1 Quantus Insights poll put her at under 8%. McMorrow suspended her campaign on July 5, just one month before the primaries. In a statement posted to social media on Oct. 20, McMorrow said donations “dried up” and she was “hounded” with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the “infamous” Wedgewood poll numbers.
Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist who ran a SuperPAC that supported McMorrow, claimed the fake poll had been “used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”
Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez quipped back and shifted the onus onto fraudulent pollsters themselves.
Michigan Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Democratic Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed at a press conference in Detroit, Michigan, on Aug. 5, 2026 —Finn Gomez—Getty Images
While documented fake polls are rare, according to experts, polling in general often plays a large role in shaping the narrative of hotly contested races.
Research has demonstrated what is known as the “bandwagon effect,” in which voters become more likely to vote for candidates or issues that are more favored in polls. A 2023 study from the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties showed that polls discouraged support for less popular ballot items, or as the paper’s authors put it: “polls demobilize the minority and mobilize the majority.”
This effect has been documented going back decades.
This phenomenon has similarly been demonstrated in prediction markets, which have been shown to sway voters almost as much as polls. A study released on Oct 20 by policy think-tank the Brennan Center showed that voters were 10% more likely to say that a candidate would win in an election if that person had higher odds of winning based on a prediction market.
Traugott says that generally speaking, voters who identify with a specific party are unlikely to change their vote as a result of polling, but that they might not show up to the polls at all if they see their party’s nominee is disfavored to win.
Should you trust polls?
Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center, says that in tight races, of which there are many in the upcoming midterms, “it's very easy for polls to ‘pick the wrong winner.’”
One of the main reasons for this, Dimock contends, is that even if participants in a survey say who they would vote for, they still might not show up to cast their ballot. He refers to this immeasurable but important factor as “enthusiasm differences.”
“What polls are really bad at capturing is who's going to actually show up and cast a ballot. It's really hard,” Dimock adds. “Human beings are bad at predicting their [own] future behaviors.”
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