Second polling firm admits to fabricating data after fake survey rocks LA mayor’s race

A second polling firm is under fire after admitting to fabricating data in a key 2026 primary election, this time in Florida.

The polling monitor FiftyPlusOne wrote in a blog post on Thursday that it had received a tip suggesting that pollster The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI) had violated one of its rules by not disclosing publicly that a survey it had released of the Republican gubernatorial primary field was commissioned by one of the candidates — a disclosure pollsters are required to make by most polling aggregators to be considered legitimate firms, as campaign-sponsored polls often tilt in the favor of the relevant candidates.

But in the course of investigating that tip, FiftyPlusOne says its analysts discovered a second problem — that a TPSI poll postmortem published in the wake of the Florida primary election on Tuesday admitted TPSI pollsters had changed the results of some respondents’ answers to lean towards James Fishback, the candidate who’d sponsored the poll. Fishback went on to be defeated in Tuesday’s primary, placing third behind Jay Collins and the winner, Rep. Byron Donalds.

“Jay Collins was polling in the twenties in our data. That did not align with our read of the race, and we concluded it might reflect a data-quality problem specific to our text-message panel. Acting on that conclusion, we identified respondents who selected Collins but whose broader profile aligned with a competing coalition, and leaned those respondents toward James Fishback,” read TPSI’s postmortem.

FiftyPlusOne called the admission evidence of an “obvious violation of standard polling practices,” which it said was “made all the more questionable by the undisclosed relationship between the pollster and the Fishback campaign.” The polling aggregator said it would not use TPSI polls in its analytics in the future.

The admission from TPSI is one that will further challenge trust in polling firms and election analytics at a moment when that trust is already badly shaken. The news comes just days after a group calling itself “Median Strategies” announced that it was shutting down after publishing fake poll results in the Los Angeles mayoral race as part of a “social experiment”.

“All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data. Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification,” read the group’s statement.