LOS ANGELES, CA — A widely shared poll showing Mayor Karen Bass leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by nearly 12 percentage points ahead of the Nov. 3 mayoral runoff election was fake, the company behind it acknowledged Monday.
Median Strategies, which had described itself as an independent polling and research firm, said it was created as "short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification," according to a message on its website.
The bogus survey claimed to have polled 560 Los Angeles voters between July 30 and Aug. 5 and listed a margin of error of 4.1%.
In response to inquiries from the Los Angeles Times, Median Strategies said the survey was not an actual poll and declined interviews. The company said it was not seeking publicity for the people involved in the experiment.
The fake results showed Bass with a nearly 12-point advantage over Raman and claimed 16% of respondents had supported former reality television personality Spencer Pratt in the June mayoral primary. Of those purported Pratt voters, about 85% planned to support Bass in November, compared with about 7% for Raman.
Median Strategies presented the results as evidence that more moderate voters were gravitating toward Bass rather than Raman, who is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.
The California Post cited the poll in a story whose headline declared "Spencer Pratt's voters could be deciding factor in LA mayor showdown."
Bass' campaign touted the results after the survey surfaced last week, posting on social media, "Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let's do this, LA!"
The post has since been deleted.
"This poll was reported on by multiple news outlets. Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Bass' campaign said in a statement.
Raman's campaign criticized Bass' team for failing to vet the company before sharing the results.
"It is the latest example of an administration that too often struggles to get the basics right — from posting about a pothole repair before the pothole was fixed to repeatedly giving Boyle Heights residents a Lineage cleanup deadline that the company now disputes," Liz Garcia, a spokesman for Raman's campaign, said in a statement. "Angelenos deserve a mayor who gets the facts right, communicates clearly, and does the work before announcing the result."
Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who has endorsed Raman, had questioned the survey before Median acknowledged it was fake, describing it as a "push poll."
That term refers to campaign tactics that are meant "to sway large numbers of voters under the guise of survey research," according to the New York Times.
"I had push polls that said I was going to lose by a landslide," Mejia wrote on social media. "We ended up landsliding our opponent & set a record for most votes ever received in a LA primary."
The Times reported that Median Strategies began posting on social media Aug. 9 and had only about 20 followers. Before releasing the Los Angeles survey, it also published a poll showing Democratic socialist Francesca Hong leading Wisconsin's gubernatorial race by more than 20 percentage points. Hong ultimately lost.
Median later acknowledged on social media that it had gotten the Wisconsin race wrong "by quite a margin."
Median's website was unavailable as of Monday afternoon.
City News Service contributed to this report.
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