The pollster had been releasing surveys since June, shifting from one midterm battleground to another: Michigan. Maine. Kansas.
On Tuesday night, after the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted the pollster, Wedgewood Polls, with questions about the authenticity of its surveys, the team behind the supposed data firm acknowledged that almost all of its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”
The fake polls were highlighted by well-known polling aggregators, including on the pages The New York Times uses to track surveys published by outside pollsters in key midterm races. The Times removed those polls Tuesday night and published an editors’ note that said it had included the Wedgewood polls — 15 in all — after the pollster answered a series of detailed questions from The Times about the pollsters’ identities, methods and funding.
It was the second time this year that fake polls have become news in the political world, underscoring the risks of misleading or false polling in an era of little-known data firms, hard-to-reach voters and suddenly ubiquitous prediction markets. It comes amid broader scrutiny of the way candidates have increasingly sought to use — or create — unreliable polling to serve their purposes, as well as larger questions over whether traditional polling can be trusted after high-profile misses.
In August, a group behind a different set of bogus polls in California, Nevada and Wisconsin said that they had published them as a “social experiment.”
Wedgewood echoed that language.
“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 in public commentary?” the supposed firm wrote in a statement it posted on social media. “The short answer: Far too easy.”
While Wedgewood claimed that it was all a ploy, the effort seemed to involve a lot of work.
The group posted survey documents on a website and on social media, which it has since removed. It also made at least three appeals on social media for funding or sponsorship to cover its activities. On Tuesday night, it posted that one of its polls — a survey in Nebraska — was “real.”
FiftyPlusOne, a polling website run by former employees of FiveThirtyEight, wrote on Tuesday night that it had reached out to Wedgewood with a request for comment earlier that day. That website had essentially sought to replicate one of Wedgewood’s polls in Mississippi, which Wedgewood has said was conducted with an online survey platform called Pollfish, after it noticed inconsistencies in Wedgewood’s data. That exercise, FiftyPlusOne wrote, made it “clear that the red flags we had seen in the Wedgewood data were definitely still waving.”
“It’s getting easier to conduct low-quality polls — or fake them altogether,” FiftyPlusOne wrote.
On Wednesday morning, a link to the website for Wedgewood Polls generated an error. An email message bounced back.
The Times listed Wedgewood’s polls on its tracking pages for the states and congressional districts the group had purported to survey. It did not claim to have produced national surveys of generic ballots, nor of President Trump’s approval rating.
The Wedgewood findings had no bearing on The Times’s own polling operation, which works in partnership with the Siena Research Institute.
The polls, which were shared on social media by other polling aggregators, helped shape the perception of the races they purported to cover, even among the candidates themselves.
After a Wedgewood poll in June showed her support in the single digits, Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator who was running in the state’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, said donations dried up and her campaign’s volunteers were left bereft.
“I felt like I had let so many of them down,” Ms. McMorrow wrote on social media on Tuesday night. The Wedgewood poll, she wrote, came on the heels of a different poll that showed her trailing, though it was ultimately spiked after her campaign raised concerns about it. (Other polls at the time showed her support declining, too.)
“It was a one-two punch,” she wrote, that “killed us.”
Last week in Mississippi, the campaign for Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for Senate, trumpeted a fake finding from Wedgewood in a news release, citing it as evidence of Mr. Colom’s “massive momentum.”
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