Overview
- Recent reporting has exposed a wave of unreliable and even fabricated public polls that have entered the media ecosystem and been published as if they measured real voter sentiment.
- Cheap online and text-message polling has largely replaced high-quality live-caller surveys, producing samples that overrepresent younger, tech-savvy people and miss older voters who turn out more reliably.
- Concrete examples in recent primaries include Michigan polling that overstated a progressive lead and Wisconsin polls that made a different candidate look inevitable before an upset victory.
- Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket can turn brief, favorable poll results into tradable odds, creating financial incentives for campaigns or others to flood the internet with biased or fake surveys.
- When media outlets publish polls and betting odds together, the items can feed on each other to influence donors, strategic decisions and voter perceptions, and strategists warn similar tactics could be used widely in the 2028 primary cycle.