A polling firm has admitted to using made-up data two weeks before the midterm elections to make it appear the U.S. Senate race in deep-red Mississippi is suddenly a toss-up.
The data and the polling firm behind it are fraudulent. It is not the first time this election cycle that phony data has been used to boost Democrats in key races that could decide which party controls Congress.
The phony firm, Wedgewood Polling, gave Democrats multipoint leads beginning in June in all the battleground races: Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Maine, Ohio and Kansas.
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Wedgewood was outed as fake just two months after the polling firm Media Strategies admitted it fabricated data to show far-left candidates were leading in the Los Angeles mayor’s race and the Wisconsin Democratic primary.
Most of Wedgewood’s fake data appears aimed at promoting Democrats over Republicans in the Nov. 3 elections. Its polls appeared on the nation’s most prominent aggregation sites, including The New York Times, and the fabricated numbers falsely inflated Democrats’ polling advantage.
“These are suppression polls trying to support their favored Democrat candidates and trying to suppress money, volunteers and donors on GOP campaigns,” veteran pollster Jim McLaughlin said. “Media should be forcing these polls they report on to disclose demographics and weighting.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said Wednesday that broadcast networks risk violating the agency’s news distortion and broadcast hoax regulations, warning that stations airing fabricated poll data jeopardize their federal licenses.
Wedgewood admitted to faking the data only after its methods were uncovered by polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne.
Analysts at the aggregator attempted to replicate Wedgewood’s Mississippi poll and found serious discrepancies, which the company said made it “suspicious of Wedgewood’s data and require an explanation.”
FiftyPlusOne confronted Wedgewood with the findings and received a foul-mouthed response.
The Washington Times attempted to reach a Wedgewood representative. The company’s social media and email accounts do not accept messages.
Late Tuesday, Wedgewood posted a statement admitting to the fake polls and claiming it was all a social experiment.
The fake numbers, it said, were a test to determine whether aggregators would carefully research polling firms before posting their data and calculating election odds based on those firms’ results.
“Having previously worked in the polling and research sector, we watched as the public’s trust in polling eroded alongside a rise in unverifiable, low-quality methodology. 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 scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?” Wedgewood said.
Many people, including Mr. McLaughlin and Mr. Carr, are not buying that story.
Mr. McLaughlin said a federal investigation is in order.
“I would like to see some attorney general go after these folks for fraud and election interference,” said Mr. McLaughlin, who has conducted polling for the Trump campaign.
Mr. Carr said in a statement Wednesday that broadcast networks, which are under the oversight of the FCC, would violate federal regulations and risk their licenses if they air phony polls.
“During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm,” Mr. Carr wrote.
Wedgewood is operated by an anonymous duo who, in their statement, say their phony polling “was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public; it was designed as a wake-up call.”
Wedgewood published several widely circulated polls, mostly on U.S. Senate races.
Some had surprising results. An Oct. 14 poll on the Mississippi U.S. Senate race showed the Republican incumbent, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, leading her Democratic opponent, Scott Colom, by just 4 percentage points. Mr. Colom promoted the survey via email, stating that the race was a dead heat. The poll also made local headlines.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists Mississippi’s U.S. Senate seat as “likely Republican.”
Wedgewood’s polling often favored Democrats, showing leads for Democratic candidates in Kansas, Maine, Texas, Georgia and Ohio.
In many of the races, the polling widened the leads found in polling from more established firms.
Nate Silver, a prominent polling aggregator and founder of Silver Bulletin, announced Wednesday that he had banned Wedgewood from his aggregation site.
“We removed Wedgewood ’polls’ from our database,” he wrote. “These polls tended to be about 1 point more favorable for [Democrats] than the consensus.”
Mr. Silver’s new model, which removed the Wedgewood poll and added a Marist poll, reduced the estimate of Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s lead over Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan from 3.6 percentage points to 3.0 percentage points.
Mr. Silver also had included Wedgewood polling in his averages for the U.S. Senate races in Georgia and Mississippi.
The Washington Times reached out to Mr. Silver and to The New York Times, which incorporated several Wedgewood polls in its aggregate.
On its website, The New York Times announced it had removed Wedgewood from its midterm polling aggregate. The newspaper had included 15 Wedgewood polls taken from June through October.
“The New York Times seeks to confirm the validity of all new pollsters. In this case, the group answered a series of questions regarding the identities of the pollsters; the methods they were using to draw their sample, contact respondents and weight their polls; and the source of their funding,” the paper said.
Larry Sabato, the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics and founder of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said he does not know the motive behind the Wedgewood farce.
“But polling has enough serious problems and a giant credibility gap to deal with already. This was an inadvisable and irresponsible ’experiment,’” Mr. Sabato said.
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