--- title: "Wedgewood Polls Admits Its Midterm Surveys Were Fake, Second Firm to Do So" description: "The firm’s numbers reached news outlets and poll trackers, and the FCC chairman has warned broadcasters against airing fake polls." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-31T01:26:34Z modified: 2026-10-31T03:59:41Z url: https://rews.cc/a/wedgewood-polls-admits-its-midterm-surveys-were-fake-second--c5f14b language: en tags: ["elections", "politics", "fraud", "media", "democracy", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Wedgewood Polls Admits Its Midterm Surveys Were Fake, Second Firm to Do So *The firm’s numbers reached news outlets and poll trackers, and the FCC chairman has warned broadcasters against airing fake polls.* By rews desk · October 31, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/wedgewood-polls-admits-its-midterm-surveys-were-fake-second--c5f14b ## In brief - Wedgewood Polls admitted this month that nearly all surveys it published since June were fabricated - The New York Times had listed 15 Wedgewood surveys in its tracker before removing them - Median Strategies admitted in August to faking results, the first such case of the cycle - Mallory McMorrow said a Wedgewood poll hurt her Michigan Senate bid, which she suspended in July - FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters over fake polls but later said he knew of no case of one being aired A polling firm called Wedgewood Polls admitted this month that nearly all the surveys it had published since June were made up, the second such confession of the midterm campaign, days before Tuesday’s elections. The firm put out numbers on races in Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Kansas and Maine, and some of them landed in news coverage and polling averages. The New York Times had listed 15 Wedgewood surveys from June to October in its tracker before taking them down, [Al Jazeera reported](https://aljazeera.com/news-analysis/2026/10/31/fake-polls-expose-vulnerabilities-in-us-elections-ahead-of-midterms) on Friday. MS NOW, Newsweek, Decision Desk HQ and Mediaite had also cited the firm. In a social media post it has since deleted, Wedgewood called the work “an experimental project” meant to expose the “vulnerabilities, lack of oversight and overall low barrier to entry” in American polling. Asked how easy it had been to get invented numbers taken seriously, the firm answered: “The short answer: Far too easy.” It [came clean on a Tuesday evening](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-company-says-its-polls-were-fake-heres-what-happened) after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and forecasting site, found inconsistencies in its raw data and in technical identifiers attached to responses. The Times had also sent the firm questions. The paper said Wedgewood had answered questions about its staff, methods and funding, and that the surveys weren’t used in its averages of presidential approval or the national congressional vote. G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist who worked on the FiftyPlusOne investigation, didn’t accept the firm’s account. “They are trying to cover up for their fraud with the ‘we were doing a social experiment’ excuse,” he said. The first case came in August, when Median Strategies admitted faking its results as what it called a “short-term social experiment.” The damage to at least one candidate was real. State Senator Mallory McMorrow of Michigan said a Wedgewood poll that put her in single digits in the Democratic Senate primary demoralized her volunteers, prompted reporters to ask whether she would quit and made donations dry up. She called that survey and another from Mitchell Research and Communications a “one-two punch” and suspended her campaign in July. “I was drowned out by outside spending and the narrative that we had completely collapsed,” Ms. McMorrow wrote. The scandal moved fast once it broke. The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which tracked how the story spread, found that it went from polling specialists to partisan commentators, and that within a day right-wing outlets were presenting it as proof that midterm polls, “especially poll numbers favoring Democrats, cannot be trusted.” President Trump went after the newspaper on Truth Social. “The New York Times got caught,” he wrote, and said the episode helped his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the paper. A day after the admission, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on X that there had been “a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process,” [The Washington Post reported](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/10/21/fccs-brendan-carr-warns-broadcasters-against-covering-fake-polls/). Broadcasters, he wrote, are barred by their licenses from “engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes.” The warning came as [Mr. Trump was polling at new lows](https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/21/media/trump-polls-fcc-brendan-carr-wedgewood), CNN reported, and it drew [a rews look at what the rule requires](https://rews.cc/a/a-fake-pollster-confessed-and-the-fcc-chair-turned-it-into-a-ef2cfd). After the commission’s Oct. 29 meeting, Mr. Carr said he wasn’t trying to punish stations for airing polls that look bad for any politician. He also said he [didn’t know of any case](https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/fcc-unaware-us-broadcast-networks-212609652.html) of a broadcaster airing a fake poll. Anna Gomez, the commission’s only Democrat, said broadcasters that report on public polls “should never be punished when a poll is wrong.” No U.S. law makes faking a poll a crime on its own, though some advocates and scholars argue the practice could count as commodities or wire fraud. Tyler Yeargain, writing in the Missouri Law Review in 2020, said those tools had “not been fully utilized” against fake pollsters. “Prosecution would serve a strong federal interest,” he wrote. For voters sorting through the last surveys before Tuesday, Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California said credible pollsters disclose their mission, their purpose and who pays them, and that polls released by partisans may be carrying a message. “Look for transparency,” he said.