This summer, a polling firm called Wedgewood had good news for the far left.
In Wisconsin, its numbers showed socialist Francesca Hong beating Republican Tom Tiffany for governor. In Texas, they had Democrat James Talarico crushing Ken Paxton among Hispanic voters, 64% to 30%. In Michigan, they showed far-left Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed running away with the Democratic primary, and his campaign was happy to cite them.
On Tuesday, Wedgewood admitted the vast majority of it was made up.
In a statement posted on X, the firm said it had used "fabricated numbers" as an "experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry in the modern political polling industry." It described itself as a "fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans." It said its goal was to see how easy it would be for a fake polling firm to gain traction.
"The short answer," Wedgewood wrote, "Far too easy."
Its numbers went everywhere. The New York Times put Wedgewood polls into its database, and so did Nate Silver. Decision Desk HQ folded them into its averages. MS NOW, Newsweek, and Mediaite all cited them. The firm's X account only opened in June. Its website listed no employees, no phone number, and no address.
The same media that spent years warning Americans about "misinformation" spent four months feeding them invented poll numbers.
The Times has since pulled 15 Wedgewood polls, and Decision Desk HQ removed 17. Only one Wedgewood survey, a crowdfunded poll in Nebraska, was supposedly real, and its GoFundMe raised $500 of its $5,000 goal.
Someone did see it coming. Back in July, a Milwaukee columnist called Wedgewood "a shady outfit" after its poll put Hong at 30% when every other survey had her far lower. Nobody in the national press listened. Hong went on to lose the primary.
The firm finally confessed only after the polling site FiftyPlusOne started asking questions about its methodology and results. Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman wasn't buying the "experiment" excuse. It's "kind of suspicious," he noted, that the firm announced its experiment on the same day it got caught.
Questions about who funded this "experiment" have arisen? Since the polls always favored Democrat candidates was it by a Democrat entity? Or was it by a Republican entity to make Democrats look dumb or to motivate conservative voters to get out and vote. No one knows the answers to these questions yet.
Wedgewood also isn't the first. In August, another firm called Median Strategies admitted it had published fake polls in governor's and mayor's races, and it used the same "social experiment" excuse.
The Democrats are furious now. "These people are absolute scumbags," said Mike Nellis, a former adviser to Kamala Harris. Wedgewood's fake numbers didn't just help far-left candidates. They also hurt a Democrat. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the Michigan Senate primary in July, less than a week after a Wedgewood poll put her at 9%. She says donations "dried up" afterward and volunteers quit.
Democrats are discovering that fake polls cut both ways, which conservatives could have told them years ago.
For two election cycles, President Trump has warned that the polls were wrong, and the press treated it as sore-loser talk. This month, discussing the Senate race in Kansas, he said it again: "Look, the polls are fake." Wedgewood had shown Democrat Adam Hamilton leading there, too.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has warned broadcasters that airing fake polls could violate their obligations to the public, and he says there has been a "significant surge" in fake and voter-suppression polls this cycle.
Wedgewood says it never intended to sway an election. But its polls were designed to look like real news, and real newsrooms treated them that way. For four months, those numbers told voters that far-left candidates had momentum, and campaigns used them in fundraising pitches. Then the firm admitted it had made them up.
The next time a poll tells you a Democrat is surging, remember that two firms in two months admitted they invented their numbers, and the people who trusted them included the New York Times.