Fake Polls by Median Strategies Undermine Trust in Election Data

During a competitive Los Angeles mayoral reelection campaign, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass shared a poll on social media that showed her leading challenger councilmember Nithya Raman by roughly 12 percentage points. Within days, the poll was revealed to be fabricated. The same “results” were posted for Democratic primaries in Wisconsin and Nevada. All three polls were released by Median Strategies, an organization that later admitted the releases were part of a short-term social experiment and subsequently shut down its website.

Associated Press

Major aggregators such as The New York Times, Real Clear Politics and FiftyPlusOne omitted the Median polls because they lacked basic methodological details—no information on who ran the firm, how the sample was drawn, or which voter file was used. Mary Radcliffe, head of research at FiftyPlusOne, echoed the concern, emphasizing that the industry relies on trust and that the missing disclosures made verification impossible.

Associated Press

Median Strategies also described polling’s “credibility problem” and presented its experiment as a “fix” that would produce unbiased numbers.

Associated Press

Prediction-market platforms registered modest reactions. On Kalshi, the price of a “yes” contract for Bass’s victory rose from about 63 cents to about 65 cents within fifteen minutes of the Median post. Polymarket saw roughly twenty accounts trade thousands of contracts in Bass’s favor six minutes after the tweet. Trading volume for the Los Angeles mayoral race had been thin, typically under ten dollars per trade in the preceding week, making the sudden concentration notable despite the small price shifts.

Associated Press

• “This is much bigger than one fake poll,” — Chris Wilson, a veteran Republican pollster — Chris Wilson, veteran Republican pollster and head of EyesOver.

Associated Press