Readers, a quick thought: Have you noticed that primary polls seem to be garbage lately? Remember Abdul El-Sayed’s double digit lead over Haley Stevens in Michigan? Remember how Francesca Hong was going to leg drop Milwaukee County Executive Jiffrenson “Jiff” Ramsey from the top rope in Wisconsin? You’re not alone in thinking that a lot of these polls might be fishy, or at the very least incompetent. And nor are you entirely correct — there is still such a thing as decent quality general election polling.
But for now, especially during primary season, you are right to be skeptical of primary polls, because as it turns out, several of them are . . . well, entirely fraudulent. (This is a very different assertion from casting doubt on big-name firms with track records of actually doing the work.) Just a week ago, it was revealed that a fly-by-night company called “Median Strategies” had released multiple fake polls — on the governor’s race in Wisconsin and the Los Angeles mayoral race in California, among others. When their spectacularly wrong Wisconsin poll (showing Hong winning by 23 points) was noticed after the fact, they revealed that they were not a polling firm at all — merely a bunch of anons who were “conducting a social experiment.”
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