When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass amplified the results last week of a favorable political poll that turned out to be fake, she was inadvertently following in the footsteps of conservative Detroit singer Kid Rock.<\/p>\n
In 2017, as Rock \u2014 real name Robert Ritchie \u2014 publicly contemplated a run for U.S. Senate in his home state of Michigan, he posted on social media the results of a poll conducted by a firm calling itself Delphi Analytica that showed him leading Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow.<\/p>\n
But those results were bogus. The people behind Delphi Analytica took down their website and refused to be identified, telling a local reporter<\/a>: \u201cThanks again and go kid rock.\u201d<\/p>\n Little is known about who was responsible for a poll supposedly conducted by an outfit calling itself Median Strategies showing Bass with a wide lead in the L.A. mayoral race over Councilmember Nithya Raman. <\/p>\n The group told The Times on Monday that its results were also fake.<\/p>\n But the episode has revived questions about whether political polling can be trusted, particularly in light of several recent high-profile primary races in which the polls seemed to have gotten the results wrong.<\/p>\n In the Michigan Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, a number of preelection polls showed progressive Abdul El-Sayed holding a commanding, double-digit lead over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), but on election night, El-Sayed eked out a one-point victory.<\/p>\n In Wisconsin, numerous polls showed progressive state Rep. Francesca Hong leading Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley in the Democratic primary for governor. Crowley narrowly defeated Hong in the primary.<\/p>\n Median Strategies \u2014 the entity behind the fake Los Angeles poll \u2014 claimed on social media that it had also conducted polling in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial race and that it had also gotten it wrong about Hong.<\/p>\n Polling in primary elections can be particularly difficult, because it can be hard to know who will actually show up on election day, said Christian Grose, a USC political science professor. Both Michigan and Wisconsin also hold open primaries, meaning that any voter can cast a ballot in a race, regardless of party affiliation, making it harder for pollsters to predict<\/a> exactly who will cast a ballot on election day.<\/p>\n Experts say fake polls are exceedingly rare but that these recent election results highlight the differences between high- and low-quality polls and how much easier it has become to conduct less rigorous polling.<\/p>\n \u201cThe barriers to entry are a lot lower now than they were 20 to 30 years ago,\u201d said Charles Franklin, a professor of law and public policy at Marquette Law School who conducts the Marquette Law School Poll.<\/p>\n Put simply, a poll is a series of questions asked of a sample of people in a given locality, state or country whose opinions are supposed to represent the attitudes of everyone in the coverage area of the poll. Pollsters typically give weights to the responses they receive \u2014 sometimes amplifying the voices of respondents from a particular ethnic group, for example \u2014 to ensure that the results are representative of the population they are surveying. <\/p>\n For decades, survey respondents were typically contacted by phone. <\/p>\n That work was expensive, Franklin said.<\/p>\n \u201cYou needed a call center, you needed to hire interviewers and you needed some sort of data processing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But now as modes of communication have changed \u2014 many people have ditched landlines and are hesitant to answer calls from unknown numbers on their cellphone \u2014 polling operations have adopted a wide variety of methods to try to contact survey respondents, including e-mail, text-messages and online surveys, which sometimes offer incentives to encourage participation.<\/p>\n Online polls can be conducted much more cheaply than polling using other modes of communication, but the quality can also vary widely.<\/p>\n Historically, most polls randomly contacted survey respondents, backed by research showing that a random sample of the population \u2014 adjusted appropriately by demographics and other factors \u2014 would give a more accurate picture of the public\u2019s attitude on a particular question.<\/p>\n But not all online polling relies on a randomly selected group of respondents, and when respondents are offered an incentive \u2014 such as cash \u2014 to complete an online survey, it can lead to inaccurate results.<\/p>\n