The political polling industry is facing a serious reckoning after a second company admitted to fabricating data across a series of polls released over the past year.
Wedgewood Polls acknowledged on Tuesday evening that most of its published results were entirely fabricated, sending shockwaves through political and media circles.
The company posted a statement on X describing its operation as an “experiment” designed to test whether a fake polling firm could gain traction in the industry.
Wedgewood’s manufactured results had been picked up and published by several major media organizations, including The Hill, The New York Times, and polling partner Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).
DDHQ and other polling aggregators moved quickly to strip the falsified results from their polling averages once the admission became public.
The scandal arrives at a particularly sensitive moment, as Republicans are already raising doubts about whether midterm polls are systematically undercounting GOP support.
The incident is compounding existing concerns about public trust in an industry that has struggled with credibility following high-profile polling misses in recent election cycles.
G. Elliott Morris, founder of the polling aggregation and political analysis site FiftyPlusOne, warned that the industry is now navigating an entirely new category of threat.
“This is a new threat to polling,” Morris said, adding that “the story of polling methodologically is one of constant innovation.”
Morris noted that the environment has shifted in a way that places new burdens on those who consume polling data, not just those who produce it.
“Now we’re in the environment where I think the people consuming polls will have to innovate as well,” Morris said, underscoring the scale of the challenge ahead.
The Wedgewood disclosure is the second such admission from a polling company in recent memory, raising broader questions about the safeguards that exist to catch fraudulent data before it influences public perception.
Aggregators like DDHQ serve as critical filters in the polling ecosystem, but the rapid absorption of Wedgewood’s fake numbers shows how quickly bad data can spread before checks catch up.
With midterm elections approaching, campaigns, strategists, and voters are now left to weigh how much confidence they can place in any single poll or average going forward.
