Jessica Tarlov Wants Stricter Aggregators After Fake Poll Hit Senate Hopeful

Jessica Tarlov said the rules for getting into the major polling aggregators have to change after a pollster admitted its surveys were fabricated. One of those surveys preceded Mallory McMorrow's exit from Michigan's Democratic Senate primary.

Tarlov made the remarks Wednesday on The Raging Perspectives, the weekly live show she co-hosts with Aaron Parnas on the Prof G Substack and YouTube. The pollster, Wedgewood Polls, admitted on Tuesday that it had been fabricating data.

"Certainly the criteria for being able to get into these mainstream and kind of vaunted aggregators, I think needs to shift," Tarlov said.

What the Wedgewood Poll Showed in Michigan

Wedgewood released a Michigan survey that put McMorrow, a state senator, in the single digits in the primary, Michigan Public reported. McMorrow later dropped out of the race, Tarlov said on the show.

McMorrow has since said the poll did serious damage. "Donations dried up. Volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do," she said.

On the show, Tarlov said the poll "was pretty pivotal in Mallory McMorrow's decision to drop out of the Michigan Senate primary," adding that "it put her in the single digits when that actually ran counter to what she was seeing in terms of fundraising and support on the ground and even some internals."

Parnas pushed back on giving the poll all the credit. "I don't think Mallory McMorrow lost her race or dropped out because of this one poll. I think that there was a trend," he said. He called it "a catalyst," saying McMorrow had been trending down in the polls released before it.

Tarlov called the poll "a complete fraud situation." Before it was exposed, she said, it "was taken incredibly seriously" and "was integrated into some of the top aggregators" that people check every day. Parnas was conditional: "if the allegations are true, this is a prosecutor's dream."

How the Fake Polls Got Into the Averages

The election-data site FiftyPlusOne caught the fabrication. Jack Sims and Andrew Prater are the names Wedgewood gave for the people running the firm, FiftyPlusOne reported. Their identities have not been fully verified; FiftyPlusOne said it confirmed Sims had previous experience in the polling industry.

The firm's polls had been added to aggregators run by The New York Times, FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub, the Washington Examiner reported. The Times and FiftyPlusOne have since taken the data out of their databases, PBS NewsHour reported. Parnas called the episode "an egg on the face moment for a lot of folks like the New York Times and others who just decided to blindly incorporate this into their aggregators without doing more research."

Disclosure standards deal with transparency, not with whether a poll is real. Under the American Association for Public Opinion Research's Code disclosure standards, pollsters must disclose the sponsor, sample and weighting immediately upon release of results. The Code applies to all public opinion researchers; AAPOR's voluntary Transparency Initiative is the program through which pollsters publicly disclose those items.

Tarlov Warns Against Treating Prediction Markets Like Polls

Tarlov tied the scandal to betting markets. "This was a college kid, but there's an older man involved in it too," she said, referring to a Kalshi betting account. One aggregator was told that Wedgewood was founded by college students, according to the Washington Examiner. Kalshi said that social media users had found an individual who "may be connected to Wedgewood" and appears to have a public account on the platform. The company said it is investigating and that its election markets mostly did not move in response to Wedgewood's polls. Kalshi's post says the account holder created the account in February 2025, before Wedgewood launched, and made $194.44 in net profit on Wedgewood-related markets. The Washington Examiner also notes conflicting reports that career pollsters ran the operation.

Tarlov said polls and prediction markets are now held "up against each other when one actually has a methodological background to it." She contrasted pollsters, "people who have done this for decades," with "a bunch of people who have an opinion about something," arguing that what prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket produce is very different from a methodologically grounded poll.

Regulating the industry was Parnas' idea, not Tarlov's. "At what point do we like start regulating polling industry?" he asked.

What Happens Next in Michigan

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who won the nomination for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat, leads Republican Mike Rogers 48 percent to 45.3 percent in PolitiKool's polling average for the race.

Richard Czuba, the pollster who runs the Glengariff Group, told Michigan Public that fake polls "are used to create a narrative." Wedgewood's own statement made a similar point, saying the standards for how polling data is "vetted, aggregated, and reported must change."