In Reply to: They will just start up again under a new name. posted by mh on August 19, 2026 at 12:29:06
Locked in a competitive reelection race, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared on social media last week that a new poll was evidence that her campaign was “gaining momentum.”
Just a few days later, the truth emerged: The poll was fabricated.
The California results were among at least three “polls” across three states posted online this month by Median Strategies, a previously unknown organization that admitted to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the purported results were fake. The company wrote before shuttering its website this week that it “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 post offered no explanation of who was behind the “experiment” or for what purpose.
The trajectory of the California poll offers a cautionary tale about the perils of trusting unvetted polling. While high-quality independent polls still exist, they appear amid a slew of other surveys produced by outside groups, campaigns or super PACs or using undisclosed or questionable methodologies. It can be a struggle to make sense of the findings — and as the latest episode shows, even campaigns may end up falling for falsified data.
“This is much bigger than one fake poll,” said Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster who now leads the public opinion firm EyesOver. “It’s never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate, and campaigns and outside groups have every incentive to amplify anything favorable before anyone verifies it.”