The Counterfeit Polling Scandal That’s Already Undermining Trust

Somebody at the Los Angeles Times looked at a poll and thought, “that looks a little too clean.”

The poll had Mayor Karen Bass up eleven points in her reelection race.

Comfortable and reassuring — the kind of margin that lets a campaign relax.

The mayor liked it so much that she put it out on her own social media accounts.

There was one problem: it wasn’t real.

The firm behind it, Median Strategies, later admitted the whole thing was a “social experiment” — an exercise to see how far fabricated numbers could travel through the political bloodstream before anybody bothered to check.

The answer was: pretty far. The company then withdrew every release it had ever published and said none of it should be cited or treated as genuine polling data.

Now, here’s the part that should get your attention if you run a business.

Median Strategies wasn’t only in Los Angeles.

It was one of those companies also showing State Rep. Francesca Hong with a fat lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary — the same race this writer discussed just last week.

Hong took 39.3% and lost to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who won with 39.8%. Crowley had registered 24% in one of the race’s last surveys and 7% in a July Marquette poll.

In recent analysis, I argued that polling has a brand problem, not a methodology problem.

I’d like to tell you I was being provocative. Now, I’m thinking not.

Here’s the branding principle, older than polling: the counterfeit never pays the price. The category does.

Nobody stops trusting the man selling fake designer watches out of a duffel bag on Canal Street. They stop trusting that brand of watch.

You can’t boycott the counterfeiter — they’re gone by Tuesday.

Instead, a customer picks up a real watch in a real store and thinks, for half a second, how do I know? That half second is the whole ballgame. That second is what Median Strategies just handed to every legitimate pollster in America. Trust.

Marquette didn’t fabricate anything. Neither did the honest pollsters analyzing response rates and difficult turnout models.

They’re the ones left carrying the odor of the bad actor in this farce.

Then there is Mayor Bass, who did what all of us are tempted to do.

Promote the good news for her campaign.

She saw a number that flattered her and she amplified it.

She didn’t ask who ran it, or how, or why a firm nobody had heard of was suddenly so generous with her.

It said what she wanted to hear, so it must be true.

That’s the singer, Sting on Broadway. Remember?

He wrote a beautiful show about his own life, and it turned out the only person deeply interested in Sting’s life was Sting. A friend finally told him the truth: nobody cares about your life; they want to hear you sing.

Bass made the identical mistake with a spreadsheet instead of a score.

Every entrepreneur reading this has done it.

The five-star review you screenshot while forgetting the twelve mediocre ones.

The one customer who loves the new product.

The consultant who tells you exactly what you had already decided.

As Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” put it: “Try to think the way the people around you think, and on that basis anything is possible.” That is precisely the job a real pollster does — and precisely the step a fabricator skips.

So what should the polling industry do?

In 1982, somebody laced Tylenol capsules with cyanide in the Chicago area.

The company could have said so loudly and gone the legal route. Instead, they pulled 31 million bottles off the shelves, ate the cost, and came back with tamper-evident packaging that became the industry standard.

They didn’t defend themselves. They rebuilt the category.

That’s the move nobody in polling has made.

Median Strategies withdrew its own garbage — fine: that’s the arsonist calling the fire department. The rest of the industry has said nothing essentially. No recall. No seal. No visible standard a voter can point to and say, “that one’s real.”

Silence is a brand decision too, and they are making it every single day by staying quiet.

Five things to take from this, whether you’re polling Wisconsin or selling storm windows:

Median Strategies wanted to know how far their deception could travel before somebody checked.
They got their answer, and so did we.
The counterfeit did what a counterfeit always does — it told people exactly what they wanted to hear, right up until it couldn’t anymore.