Polls Are The AIDS Of American Politics

The polling industry has not merely failed to fix itself; it has become an electoral virus, surging through America’s body politic with almost no effective immune response.

Joseph Ford Cotto | October 27, 2026

The American polling industry has degenerated from a chronic undercount of President Donald J. Trump’s support into an apocalyptic plague that distorts reality, right as voters cast their ballots.

What began as the political equivalent of HIV in 2016 has morphed into full-blown electoral AIDS. Fabricated surveys, “internal polls” engineered as Democrat fundraising props, and incestuous media amplification systematically mislead the public.

A fresh scandal makes the virus impossible to misdiagnose.

Wedgewood Polling was an outfit with no meaningful track record. Its numbers were nonetheless carried by the New York Times, among other outlets esteemed by the guiding lights of American journalism. Wedgewood’s operators later confessed that nearly every “survey” was invented to test whether reporters and aggregators would notice fake statistics. This fake pollster, having generated throngs of fake news, concluded that passing off fabricated data was “far too easy.”

One of those synthetic surveys showed Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, collapsing to single digits. She later said donations to her U.S. Senate campaign dried up and volunteers quit.

Median Strategies, another now-defunct firm, ran a parallel exercise.

It published a Wisconsin Democrat gubernatorial primary poll with socialist Francesca Hong up 20 points. A Los Angeles mayoral survey showed blue incumbent Karen Bass ahead by 12. After the results failed to materialize, Median admitted its numbers were falsified as a “short-term social experiment” about the influence of fake polls. It immediately disbanded.

SoCal Strategies, another upstart “pollster,” later vanished from cyberspace amid questions from the same researchers who exposed Wedgewood. Before SoCal self-deleted, its numbers had been circulated to untold millions of people for years, almost entirely on social media. There is no telling the damage it waged upon the psyche of American voters.

This carnage sits atop an already dismal record of genuine 2026 midterm........

© American Thinker