Urban Milwaukee Story Gets International Attention

Early voting booth. Photo taken July 28, 2026 by Sophie Bolich.

Last week the polling website FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls with questions about the authenticity of its surveys. In response, the team behind the supposed pollster acknowledged that its work was fake. The whole thing, Wedgewood claimed, was an “experimental project.”

The project had an impact on election campaigns, with polls it did since June on many races, “shifting from one midterm battleground to another,” the New York Times reported, including Michigan, Maine, Kansas and Wisconsin.

But was this experimental project actually a Republican disinformation campaign? The Times and Nate Silver included the Wedgewood polls in their analysis stories about midterm races, and those fake reports may have hurt real candidates, as Time magazine reported.

All of which has generated a hailstorm of coverage by The Washington Post, PBS, Fox News, The Economist, The Guardian and many other news outlets. It has also gotten international attention, in stories by the AFP, the European equivalent of America’s Associated Press, and by Der Spiegel (The Mirror), one of the largest news magazines in Europe.

I learned about the international coverage from Claus Hecking, a reporter for Der Spiegel who interviewed me after the publication’s team of researchers tracked the history of this controversy to a series of stories published months ago by Urban Milwaukee.

Der Spiegel published a story on Saturday entitled “Dirty US Election Campaign: How Dubious Polling Institutes Try to Damage Democrats with Fake Data.” The story noted that it was back “in July” that Urban Milwaukee “uncovered a hoax that is now shaking America’s political and media landscape: just before the midterm elections on November 3—the elections that will determine the political balance of power in the US.” (The story is in German and behind a pay wall, alas.)

The media has reported that Wedgewood began releasing polls in June. On July 7, a story by Urban Milwaukee raised questions about a Wedgewood poll on the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Up to then, the most recent Marquette poll had shown Hong with 14% of the vote, and a more recent internal poll released by the campaign of Sara Rodriguez showed Hong at 22%. But the Wedgewood poll had Hong at a whopping 30%, which could “help convince Democrats who doubt her electability that she is running away with the race,” the story reported, noting that Wisconsin Republican Chairman Brian Schimming had said that for Republicans Hong would be the best opponent.

Making the poll more “suspicious,” the story noted, is that Wedgewood claimed it was sponsored by the Isthmus Political Report, a shadowy group about which no information could be found.

Urban Milwaukee did a follow-up story noting the sponsor was referred to as “Isthmus” in a posting by the conservative group the MacIver Institute. But Judith Davidoff, editor of the Madison publication with a long history as an alternative weekly, told Urban Milwaukee that Isthmus didn’t sponsor any polls and never had, and had no connection to Isthmus Political Report.

The story also reported that Isthmus Political Report had an account on X, called IsthmusPol, where it promoted Francesca Hong in the Democratic Primary and praised Wedgewood Polls, saying “I can vouch for them, they’re great to work with.”

As for Wedgewood Polls, its X account, wedgewoodpol, described itself as “Progressive but unbiased,” and its tweets also promoted Francesca Hong.

All of this suggested that Wedgewood polls “appeared to be a Republican front group that passes itself off as liberal,” as an August story by Urban Milwaukee about fake and questionable pollsters noted.

Wedgewood Polls’ recent statement that its work was an experimental project echoed an earlier statement in August by a group called Median Strategies, saying its polls were fake and done as an experiment to see how easily fake polls “spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”

But the Wedgewood “experiment” clearly sought to push Democratic voters in a way that would help Republican candidates. Just as it tried to elevate the candidacy of Francesca Hong, the most liberal candidate in the Wisconsin Democratic primary, it released a fake poll showing Mallory McMorrow, the moderate candidate in the Michigan primary for U.S. Senate, “plummeting into single digits,” as Time reported. “McMorrow said donations ‘dried up’ and she was ‘hounded’ with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the infamous’ Wedgewood poll numbers.”

“It killed us,” she wrote on X.

All of which helped the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate Republicans want to run against and who won the primary.

The supposed “experiment” by Median Strategies also showed Hong doing better than other polls had, leading by 20 percentage points. In short, both polls did their best to elevate Hong.

The Der Spiegel story reported that according to the Florida business registry, one of the Wedgewood executives, Jack Sims, founded the company SoCal Strategies in March 2025, which also did polls, one of which showed Kentucky Congressman and anti-Trump Republican Thomas Massie doing poorly. (Massie was defeated in the primary.) Others in the media have reported on Sims and this company, which has taken down its social media accounts and disappeared.

There is an obvious conclusion from all this skullduggery: the media and polling aggregators need to start verifying that a pollster is real before reporting the results.

An invite to readers: On Sunday there will be a reading of Wings of a Dove, a new play adapting the Henry James novel by Bruce Murphy, at Pink Umbrella Theater. For more details check this press release.