Median Strategies admitted Monday that the Los Angeles mayoral poll it circulated was bogus, reversing a claim that Karen Bass was leading Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff.
The fake poll was packaged like ordinary campaign data. It said it surveyed 560 Los Angeles voters from July 30 to Aug. 5, carried a 4.1% margin of error and even broke out support for Spencer Pratt, whose voters were said to be moving heavily toward Bass. That kind of precision helped the numbers travel fast, first through social media and then into news coverage, before the company said the poll was not real.
For readers trying to separate a stunt from a survey, the timing matters. Bass had already posted on X from her campaign account, citing Median Strategies as the source and writing, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” A campaign spokesperson later pointed to the wider reach of the claim, saying, “This poll was reported on by a news outlet,” and called for bad faith attempts to influence elections to be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Median Strategies said the point was to test how polling claims can move through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. The company said it was a short-term social experiment, not an effort to seek publicity or to identify the people behind it, and declined interviews. In other words, the poll was built to look credible enough to be shared, and that is exactly what happened.
Controller Kenneth Mejia underscored how easily voters and politicians can be misled by bad polling when he noted on X that polls had once shown him losing before he won his election by a wide margin. Median Strategies had only started posting on social media on Aug. 9 and had about 20 followers, yet it was already presenting itself as a fix for polling’s credibility problem, saying, “Polling has a credibility problem. Ours is the fix: no partisan clients, no campaign or party money, numbers that go wherever the data takes them even when it’s inconvenient. Trustworthy polling, rebuilt,”
The company’s admission now leaves a sharper question than the false margin itself: how many readers saw the poll before it was challenged, and how many will ever see the correction. The firm later made a similar mistake in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race, where it posted that Francesca Hong was ahead by more than 20 percentage points before later writing, “We got Wisconsin wrong- and by quite a margin too,” That makes the Los Angeles episode less like a one-off prank than a warning about how quickly bogus numbers can become part of the record.
