Wedgewood Polling Says the Vast Majority of Its Data Was Fabricated, Calling It an Experiment
Wedgewood Polling, whose polls had been cited by national news outlets, said the vast majority of its data had been fabricated, describing the operation as an experimental project meant to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of the modern political polling industry. It released that statement after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and election analysis site, questioned the veracity of the firm's results.
Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, questioned Wedgewood's account that the whole thing had always been intended as an experiment.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Wedgewood framed it as a hypothesis: how easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutiny exists in media and public commentary? Its own answer, posted to X, was that it was far too easy — which reads less like a confession than like a charge sheet against everyone else.
FiftyPlusOne contests the premise that nobody looked. It refuted Wedgewood's claim that its site and The New York Times had absorbed the polling data without verifying the source, the methodology, or whether the firm was legitimate.
Intent aside, the numbers had real recipients. Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, wrote that a Wedgewood poll in June showed her plummeting into single digits, which she said conflicted with her campaign's internals; she suspended her Senate campaign in July, about a month before the primary that Abdul El-Sayed won.