As if we didn’t already have enough reason to mistrust polls. I wonder how many other pollsters coming up with suspiciously favorable numbers for socialist and progressive candidates are actually “social experiments” as well. Wanna bet that Texas is part of an “experiment,” too?
At least Median Strategies fessed up yesterday. Not that they had much choice, but also, even their confession looks like another form of manipulation.
The fake poll by Median Strategies showed Bass leading Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff, and said the results were based on a survey of 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5. It said it had a 4.1% margin of error.
But Monday, in response to repeated inquiries from The Times, the company said the purported “poll” was nothing of the kind.
“Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” the company said in an email to The Times. “We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”
The kayfabe didn’t get limited to Los Angeles. It turns out that Median also produced inflated numbers in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary:
“Polling has a credibility problem. Ours is the fix: no partisan clients, no campaign or party money, numbers that go wherever the data takes them even when it’s inconvenient. Trustworthy polling, rebuilt,” it wrote in its first post.
Median then released a poll on the Wisconsin gubernatorial race showing Democratic socialist Francesca Hong up by more than 20 percentage points. Hong ended up losing.
I had included this story in last night’s Final Word. At that time, I had not realized that Median Strategies had conducted polls outside of Los Angeles. However, here’s the problem with that claim: RealClearPolling does not list any such survey in its aggregate of the Democrat gubernatorial polls. One poll showing Hong up 20 points in the final week of the primary does show up at RCP, but that poll is credited to PPP, while its link suggests that it’s an internal poll conducted by the David Crowley campaign.
Did PPP conduct that poll? Did Crowley hire Median? If Crowley hired Median, did they commit fraud by selling his campaign false data? Or did Median simply just put out a press release to which no one paid any attention?
As it turns out, the Median survey result fit right into an entire avalanche of bad polling in Wisconsin in the final month of the campaign:
- Marquette tracking poll, 7/16: Hong +11
- Impact Research: Hong +13
- PPP, 7/22: Hong +20
- Marquette tracking poll, 7/27: Hong +22
- PPP, 8/5: Hong +18
In fact, Median does not appear to have ever showed up in any poll tracked by RCP, in any race. If this was a social experiment in Wisconsin, it didn’t succeed. That’s mainly because all of the other pollsters came up with similar results with supposed predictive value, all of which turned out to be useless – and suspicious in the amplitude of its uselessness. The industry didn’t need Median to run a “social experiment” to put egg on its collective face.
This raises an uncomfortable question: Is this claim also a “social experiment,” this phase targeting poll skeptics? Hmmmm.
The bottom line here is that it’s better to follow the money than to follow the polls. If James Talarico has to spend $25 million attempting to woo black voters, claims that he’s leading in Texas are just as reliable as memos from Median Strategies – and a few other pollsters, too.
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