Francesca Hong, the failed communist candidate in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary race, was supposed to shellac David Crowley. After all, she had a 23-point lead over her opponent, according to data from Median Strategies.
But it turns out Median Strategies was a fake polling company that just wanted to run a “social experiment” and observe the effects of deceptive polling in a political race.
“Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls,” a statement from Median Strategies read. “All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.”
“Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the statement continued. “Thank you for your understanding.”
And Median Strategies didn’t just release fake polling data for the Wisconsin gubernatorial race — the Los Angeles mayoral race was also the victim of fabricated polling data. Median Strategies released a poll that indicated Mayor Karen Bass was “leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.” The poll was purportedly conducted between July 30 and Aug. 5 amongst 560 voters in Los Angeles with a 4.1 percent margin of error. The company later revealed to The Los Angeles Times that the poll was also fake.
The admission by Median Strategies that its polls were entirely made up leaves Americans with even less trust in polls. Pollsters get it wrong, sometimes for obvious reasons. But skepticism in the polls has only grown as pollsters routinely get it wrong — very wrong.
As The Federalist’s Matt Kittle chronicled, in the final PBS/NPR/Marist election poll of 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris led by 4 percentage points, “outside the poll’s 3.5-point margin of error.” The Washington Post reported days before Election Day that Harris had a “big early-vote” lead over Trump. On Nov. 2, Fortune ran a headline stating: “October Surprise: Trump just blew a huge lead, and the Madison Square Garden Rally started the drop, says top data scientist.” Another pollster assessed Harris as leading Trump by 3 points in Iowa — before Trump won the state by double digits. The pollster later admitted it was a “big miss.”
It didn’t matter that the Biden administration and Harris had low approval ratings, or that the country was suffering from a mass invasion, high inflation, and unrest. The polls showed Harris winning, and those polls were taken at face value. Skeptics of those polls harkened back to the 2016 election when Americans were all but guaranteed to see a President Hillary Clinton — with The New York Times infamously giving her a 90 percent chance of beating Trump in mid-October.
Pollster John McLaughlin later told Kittle that some “media pollsters let their bias determine what they see in the polls, and it didn’t have to go that way.”
Now the reality that Median Strategies’ polls were a bunch of baloney calls into question whether other pollsters are also just engaging in a “social experiment.”
