Somebody made up a poll. And a sitting mayor fell for it.
Median Strategies, the outfit behind a survey claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass held a nearly 12-point lead over City Councilmember Nithya Raman, came clean this week: it was all fiction.
The company announced Monday it’s shutting down its “polling project” entirely, scrubbing every release it ever published. Don’t cite them, don’t trust them — they said so themselves.
The confession, buried on the company’s own website, reads less like a correction and more like a confession from a science experiment gone rogue. Median Strategies says it built the whole operation to test something dark: how fake polling numbers slip into the political bloodstream and spread — no fact-checking required.
Mission, it seems, accomplished.
The numbers themselves were almost cartoonish.
The poll claimed 16 percent of the 560 people surveyed backed Spencer Pratt — yes, that Spencer Pratt, reality TV alum turned mayoral hopeful — and that 85 percent of his supporters were ready to jump to Bass in November. A tidy, implausible story, dressed up with a scientific-sounding 4.1 percent margin of error.
Bass didn’t wait to check the math. She posted about it on X — since deleted — crowing about “momentum” and telling Angelenos to “do this.” When the poll turned out to be smoke, her campaign pivoted to outrage, demanding prosecution for “bad faith attempts to influence elections.”
Raman’s campaign wasn’t buying the pivot. They called it one more entry in a pattern — an administration, they argue, that announces first and checks facts later. They pointed to Boyle Heights, where residents are still waiting on a cleanup deadline the company involved now disputes, months after a warehouse fire tore through the neighborhood.
The real headline isn’t the fake poll.
It’s who rushed to believe it.
Bruh.
“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.” pic.twitter.com/6N1lPaWmKS
— Unrig LA (@UnrigLA) August 17, 2026
