Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) triumphantly shared the results of a poll released last week showing that she enjoyed a 50%-39% lead over Councilwoman Nithya Raman (D) ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.
Bass tweeted an image of herself beside a graphic of the poll results and wrote, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!”
‘The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source.’
Unfortunately for the Democrat, the poll — said to have been based on a survey of 560 L.A. voters between July 30 and Aug. 5 — was entirely fake, reported the Los Angeles Times.
The outfit behind the poll, which calls itself Median Strategies, announced on its website that it has “concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data.”
“Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” added the bogus pollster.
The fake pollster went the distance with its so-called “social experiment” in the Bass race, providing some additional fake details and even analysis.
It claimed, for instance, that of the 16% of respondents who previously voted for Spencer Pratt, over 85% were planning to vote for Bass in the general election, reported the Times.
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Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times/Getty Image
Median Strategies noted, “Faced with a choice between the incumbent and a Democratic Socialists of America-aligned challenger, most Pratt voters appear to be treating Bass as the more familiar, more moderate option rather than sitting out the race.”
An archived version of the outfit’s now-scrubbed website provides further evidence of the fakers’ commitment to the ruse.
Under the heading “How We Poll,” Median Strategies said its releases are “built on a documented sampling frame, a mixed-mode interview process, and a transparent weighting scheme. We publish our methodology alongside every release so you can evaluate our numbers the same way we do.”
Unlike Bass, Pratt wasn’t fooled, writing on Friday in response to the California Post’s reporting on the fake results, “LOL you think my voters are going to vote for the crying carpetbagger in charge of homelessness who ‘found’ 40K votes on Skid Row 7 days after the election?”
Blaze News has reached out to the California Post for comment.
The Bass campaign has demanded that consequence be visited upon those who so badly bruised their egos.
“This poll was reported on by a news outlet,” a spokesperson for the Bass campaign told the Times. “Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
A spokesman for Raman’s campaign criticized Bass for pushing the fake poll, telling KTLA-TV, “The mayor’s campaign promoted a fake poll without properly vetting the source.”
“It is the latest example of an administration that too often struggles to get the basics right — from posting about a pothole repair before the pothole was fixed to repeatedly giving Boyle Heights residents a Lineage cleanup deadline that the company now disputes,” continued Raman’s campaign. “Angelenos deserve a mayor who gets the facts right, communicates clearly, and does the work before announcing the result.”
According to the Politics & Poll Tracker, one of the many accounts on X that shared but has since deleted fake polling from the outfit, Median Strategies had also released fake survey results regarding other races.
For example, Median Strategies allegedly released a poll in the Nevada governor’s race showing that Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo was leading Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford (D) 51%-46%. Recent polling from apparently legitimate outfits have Lombardo leading Ford by at least seven percentage points.
Median Strategies also released a poll on the Wisconsin governor’s primary race showing the white-hating democratic socialist Francesca Hong with a 23-point lead over Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Crowley won the Democratic nomination in a tight election last week.
Median Strategies alleged that no one involved with its faking polling operation “received compensation or financial benefit from the project, and the project was not funded, commissioned, or directed by any candidate, campaign, political party, PAC, media organization, or other outside entity.”
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