Dem
52
Ties
3
GOP
45
Earlier this week, FiftyPlusOne outed Wedgewood Polls as a fraud. Yesterday, FiftyPlusOne, with an assist from The Washington Post, effectively outed SoCal Strategies as another fraud. Not a good week for faith in polling.
To understand what happened, it helps to know exactly how Wedgewood was brought down. FiftyPlusOne found a Wedgewood poll of the Mississippi Senate race to be questionable, so they asked for the raw data. Wedgewood provided it, and it was too "clean" (for example, the percentage of "respondents" who were Black exactly matched the percentage of Mississippians who are Black; same with women and several other groups). FiftyPlusOne paid Pollfish, the same online response collector that Wedgewood allegedly used, to conduct the same poll with the same questionnaire. The results were way different, and so too was the metadata that appeared in the files sent by Pollfish. It was clear that there was a rat here, and Wedgewood was busted.
A big part of what made the Wedgewood scam possible—and this is true with the other fake pollster this year, Median Strategies—is that their website did not identify exactly who was working for the firm. That means there's not even the most basic of accountability. Only a couple other high-producing pollsters this cycle were lacking this information: Quantus Insights and SoCal Strategies. With a little detective work, FiftyPlusOne was able to establish that a Republican operative named Jack Sims was (is?) associated with both Wedgewood and SoCal Strategies. When FiftyPlusOne and the Post tried to contact SoCal Strategies to ask some questions, the firm deleted its entire online presence (website, eX-Twitter, etc.) and disappeared into the ether (Quantus Insights, for its part, added a "Staff" page to its website).
There is still a fair bit that is unclear here. It is plausible that SoCal Strategies was initially legit, and then the name was hijacked by Sims and/or other bad actors. Since their earlier polls look OK, some outlets have retained those in their database and removed only the more recent ones (for our part, we removed all SoCal Strategies polls from our database several months ago, because they smelled fishy). Also unclear is what the motivation was here. The explanation from Median Strategies a few months back was that they were (actually, he was) trying to show how ripe for abuse the process of reporting polls is. Wedgewood has sort of said the same, but that's a little harder to swallow, especially when you have a professional operative behind the firm.
Certainly, Wedgewood at least helped derail the campaign of the centrist Mallory McMorrow, which may have made it easier for Abdul El-Sayed to get the Democratic nomination in the U.S. Senate race in Michigan, which in turn may have made for an easier path for Republican candidate Mike Rogers. These are suppositions, but they are the kind of suppositions a Republican operative might make, and might try to put into effect. In other words, it's certainly possible these phony polls were a form of rodent reproduction. And even if they weren't, certainly there are some sleazy folks out there who are getting some interesting ideas for 2028.
So, the folks who rely on polls—including us—are going to have to be even more careful going forward. Obviously, any firm that does not identify its personnel is off the table. And because it would be pretty easy to fake a staff page, it's going to be necessary to look into these people's backgrounds, and to make sure that they are real and that their résumés are legit. Since we are a small operation, we are not exactly equipped to chase down pollsters and verify their bios. But FiftyPlusOne is doing yeoman work on that front right now. And we think it's safe to guess that some of the major outlets—like The New York Times, which was very embarrassed about including Wedgewood in its database—will be doing more aggressive vetting in the future. (Z)