Trustworthy polling, rebuilt · ↗ www.pbs.org

On Monday, the L.A. Times broke the story that a supposed polling firm that had just released a poll favourable to incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was fake.

In response to basic questions posed by the newspaper, the previously unknown firm, Median Strategies, wrote that the company “was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

Major poll aggregators, such as The New York Times, Real Clear Politics, and FiftyPlusOne, did not take the bait, in part because the company refused to release basic information about itself or its polls. But several social media polling accounts did, as did Bass’s campaign, which touted the fake results in a now-deleted post. So did prediction market traders, as the poll announcement was soon followed by an intense burst of trading on Kalshi and Polymarket, producing a small but noticeable price movement within fifteen minutes of the post.

Median Strategies, which boasted the slogan “Trustworthy polling, rebuilt”, also released polls in a number of other high-profile races, but these results were not followed by discernible movement in their respective prediction markets.

No one as of yet knows who is behind the fake polling company or what their true motivations were. But while the gatekeepers of the mainstream polling averages successfully kept these bad polls from contaminating their models, whatever Median Strategies was doing did reveal a market for dubious polling on social media—and, more literally, on prediction markets.