According to the Gateway Pundit, recent contests in Michigan and Wisconsin exposed just how unreliable modern polling has become, with surveys badly misreading Democrat primaries and consistently tilting toward the most left-wing candidates. In Michigan’s Democrat Senate primary and Wisconsin’s Democrat governor primary, the polls did not merely miss by a few points; they systematically favored far-left contenders, reinforcing a narrative that progressive candidates enjoy broader support than actually exists.
Now Los Angeles is confronting its own polling scandal, this time involving a supposed advantage for Mayor Karen Bass over Councilmember Nithya Raman, a Democrat Socialist of America-aligned candidate. A widely circulated survey claimed Bass, the establishment favorite, was comfortably ahead of Raman, but the firm behind the numbers has now admitted the entire exercise was fabricated.
August 18, 2026
“A poll claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by a wide margin — and picking up support from most voters who backed Spencer Pratt in the mayoral primary — was bogus, the company behind the poll acknowledged Monday.” The fake poll by Median Strategies asserted Bass led Raman by nearly 12 percentage points in advance of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff, allegedly based on a survey of 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5, with a claimed 4.1% margin of error.
Yet when pressed by the Los Angeles Times, the firm conceded the so?called survey was never a legitimate poll at all. “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 phony poll went further, claiming that 16% of respondents had voted for Spencer Pratt and that roughly 85% of those voters now backed Bass, with only about 7% supporting Raman. “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,” Median wrote in its analysis.
Polls have long been wielded as political weapons, but this cycle’s abuses highlight a deeper problem: a media and academic ecosystem that rarely scrutinizes data when it benefits Democrats and progressive causes. As conservatives have warned since the days of President Donald Trump’s first campaign, the pattern is striking—“it always favors Democrats,” and the fact that such distortions keep recurring is more than a little “strange” for anyone who still believes elections should be decided by voters, not by manufactured narratives.
