Poll showing LA Mayor Karen Bass leading Nithya Raman by a wide margin was fake: Company
Median Strategies said the fabricated surveys were a short-term social experiment to test how unverified polling spreads, and the Bass poll showed a 12-point lead.
- On Monday, Median Strategies withdrew fabricated election polls from three states, admitting the organization created them as a "short-term social experiment" to test how false information spreads through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.
- Before shuttering its website this week, the previously unknown organization claimed its "social experiment" investigated how purported polling information enters the political ecosystem, though it refused to identify who operated the firm or its website.
- Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass shared a fake poll showing a nearly 12-point lead over City Council member Nithya Raman, which briefly shifted betting market prices on Kalshi and Polymarket before the campaign removed the post.
- Major polling aggregators including The New York Times and FiftyPlusOne ignored the surveys due to lack of transparency and methodological detail, while experts criticized the firm for wreaking havoc in elections with real stakes.
- Veteran Republican pollster Chris Wilson, who leads the public opinion firm EyesOver, said "it's never been easier to make invented numbers look legitimate," warning that bad actors can manipulate public understanding of races as low-quality polls proliferate.
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Speaking of Bad Polls…
The poor quality of polling with regard to the midterm primaries has been widely commented on. Largely, that reflects the fact that primaries are inherently small turnout, volatile, and hard to poll. But this year there was something else going on: So this is pretty wild: A polling firm that came out of nowhere to show Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead over David Crowley in the Wisconsin primary has shut down and said its whole operation was …
Mysterious Polling Firm Fooled A Major Democrat Campaign — Then Admitted Everything Was Fake – 100PercentFedUp.com – by Donald
An anonymous polling operation fed fabricated numbers into three live elections, won public amplification from a Democrat mayor's campaign, and then vanished.
Photo of adhesives with the phrase "I voted" at Maples Elementary School, on the day of the primary elections, Tuesday, August 4, 2026, in Dearborn, Michigan. AP/Nic Antaya An American company admitted to having invented election research results as part of a social experiment to show how quickly false information could circulate without verification. "Median Strategies" surveys involved primary disputes in California and Wisconsin, in the Unite…
What to know about fake election poll numbers shared and retracted by a mysterious company
A mysterious political firm admitted to fabricating multiple election polls this month. None of the fake results from a company called Median Strategies appeared in Associated Press coverage.
Coverage Details
Bias Distribution
- 38% of the sources lean Right
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