A GOOGLE SITES PAGE WITH NO PHONE NUMBER (The Daily Whatever Press)—A polling firm with no office, no staff list, and no phone number has admitted it made up its numbers, and when the people who caught it, FiftyPlusOne, came knocking, it answered with a direct message that said “Fuck you.”
Meet Wedgewood Polls. Named like Grandma’s good china, except Grandma’s china was real and actually worth something.
On Tuesday night, Wedgewood posted a statement on X confessing that the whole operation was “an experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities, lack of oversight, and overall low barrier to entry” in political polling. There was, it admitted, “no real data behind the vast majority of our releases.” Getting national news outlets to run fake numbers, the statement bragged, was “far too easy.”
Hahahaha. Cool, bros. So, you got caught fucking with real campaigns and then pretended it was an “experiment”?
Pssst, Wedgewood: an experiment has a hypothesis, a control group, and an ethics board. You had a Google Site and the morals of a sewer rat.
The lab rat was a Senate campaign
In late June, Wedgewood released a nine-page Michigan survey of 353 “likely Democratic primary voters,” complete with demographic crosstabs for people who, as far as anyone can tell, were never asked a goddamned thing. It put Abdul El-Sayed at 46%, Haley Stevens at 39%, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow at 9%.
Then the thing a fake poll does to a real campaign happened to McMorrow’s. “Donations dried up,” she wrote this week. Her volunteers “were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do.” Reporters started asking when she’d drop out. “Then all of the sudden it was a pattern—and people believed it had to be true.” On July 5, she suspended her campaign.
“It killed us.”
Jennifer Holdsworth, who ran the super PAC backing McMorrow, says donors used that poll as their excuse to pull back while her side was being outspent by $80 million.
Wedgewood now swears the project “was never intended to sway an election.” You dropped a fake poll into the middle of a Democratic primary for one of the most important Senate seats in the country, in a year when every donor in America reads toplines like a stock ticker. What the fuck did you think it was going to sway? The TIDES?
McMorrow said it better than I can: “tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in,” and “it was treated like a game.”
The same fake numbers flattered El-Sayed, who won the Aug. 4 primary, and his campaign cited them. So now the right-wing press is gleefully hanging this on the one guy in the story who didn’t make anything up.
The press bought a horse that didn’t exist
Nobody gets to say they weren’t warned. Wedgewood’s very first poll, in Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary, had John Fleming beating Julia Letlow by 4 points. Letlow won by almost 14 on June 27. On July 10, Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly pointed out that the firm was brand new and had just faceplanted on its debut. On Aug. 20, Straight Arrow News reported that Wedgewood’s website lived on Google Sites, listed no staff, no phone number, and no location, and had been registered on June 26. Two people, both anonymous.
The outlets kept running it anyway: Newsweek, The Hill, the Daily Beast, Breitbart, and the Washington Examiner all served up Wedgewood numbers. Earlier this month, MS NOW featured a Wedgewood poll showing Jocelyn Benson up 10 on John James in the governor’s race. On Oct. 8 and 9, Wedgewood “surveyed” 607 likely Michigan voters and found El-Sayed at 53%, Mike Rogers at 47%, and 0% undecided. Newsweek picked that one up too.
Zero percent undecided, in Michigan, less than four weeks before an election. You couldn’t get 0% of Michiganders to agree on whether Faygo counts as a beverage.
The New York Times listed 15 Wedgewood polls in its tracker with a note that read, word for word, “This pollster does not meet our criteria for selected pollsters.” They LABELED it. Then they kept it on the page anyway, like stamping “may contain glass” on a jar of baby food and shipping the pallet to Target. “Sorry! Your baby’s bleeding mouth was an experiment to demonstrate vulnerability!”
Decision Desk HQ has since pulled 17 Wedgewood polls, and Newsweek retracted three articles and corrected others.
Blech!
Wedgewood’s statement blames FiftyPlusOne, the Times, and the aggregators for failing to vet it. FiftyPlusOne says that’s false, and it’s rich coming from the guy holding the crowbar. But every editor who ran these numbers should feel that one in their fillings, because the burglar walked in through the front door in broad daylight. This is what a horse-race addiction does to a newsroom: a number lands, it confirms a story somebody already wanted to write, and nobody calls the pollster, because there’s no number to call.
The only real thing they ever made
Mary Radcliffe, G. Elliott Morris, and Cooper Burton at FiftyPlusOne did what nobody else bothered to do. They asked for the raw data. On Oct. 15, Wedgewood handed over a Mississippi Senate file it said came from Pollfish. FiftyPlusOne checked the electronic markers, called Pollfish, compared the file against another firm’s records, and found it was fabricated. They gave Wedgewood until midnight on Oct. 20 to answer questions. Wedgewood skipped the questions, posted its “experiment” confession, and sent FiftyPlusOne that “Fuck you,” along with the name of somebody who had nothing to do with any of it. Morris calls the “social experiment” line exactly what it is, a cover-up for fraud.
And Wedgewood insists exactly one of its polls was legit: a crowdfunded Nebraska Senate survey. The GoFundMe raised $500 of a $5,000 goal. The one honest thing these clowns ever made, and they couldn’t get a tenth of it paid for.
I was 19 the summer Milli Vanilli’s backing track skipped onstage in Connecticut. They lost their Grammy over it, and nobody ever claimed the whole thing was an experiment on the music industry. Wedgewood looked at that history and decided to blame it on the rain that was fallin’, fallin’.
Two anonymous people faked a Democratic Senate primary, took donor money for “crowdfunded” polls, watched a real campaign bleed out, and then flipped off the reporters who caught them. Every donor they took money from, every campaign they kneecapped, and every outlet they turned into a ventriloquist’s dummy should lawyer up and sue these two into oblivion. I’m not a lawyer. I’d still pay to sit in on the depositions. And every editor who ran a Wedgewood number without picking up a phone owes Mallory McMorrow’s volunteers an apology, in writing, wouldn’t you say?
Sue Wedgewood until the only thing left is a Google Sites page with no phone number.
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They destroyed McMurrows campaign and they get to just walk away?! Isn't that fraud?
I trust no polls. None. They offer a false sense of security. People can lie and then vote their “vibe” on election day or sit on their duffs in protest.