I’m not sure where to start with this. The latest news is some mix of Webistics, Jukt Micronics and Animal House. But here goes. Yesterday we noted that a FiftyPlusOne investigation had led to the outing of “Wedgewood Polls” as a publisher of entirely fake polls. It’s still unclear the precise motives, but some political narrative setting aim and gaming betting markets seem like good bets. The details are wild. (But see the earlier post or FiftyPlusOne’s write-up for more.)
Early this morning I woke to a short item in The Washington Post noting another pollster, SoCal Strategies, had straight up disappeared. By disappeared it meant that overnight its website, Substack and Twitter account had all vanished. In the earlier write-up of the investigation of Wedgewood, FiftyPlusOne had noted that one of the ways it had initially vetted Wedgewood was speaking to people at another polling firm where one or more of the Wedgewood guys had worked. I can’t remember if I’d already heard SoCal’s name come up in this story. But when I saw the Post item I immediately knew it had to be them. Yes, fake polls are a problem. But stuff like we’re seeing here is super rare. They had to be connected.
It turns out that this too was almost certainly prompted by the FiftyPlusOne investigation of Wedgewood. (Here’s their followup piece on SoCal.) They’d apparently reached out to SoCal in the process of investigating Wedgewood. But as the Wedgewood thing blew out they went radio silent. And now they’ve disappeared entirely.
If any of you remember the Stephen Glass saga and Jukt Micronics, a lot of the latest round of this story feels like that. It’s not clear that a number of the named people involved even exist. And in the cases of people who FiftyPlusOne seems to have verified do exist, it seems like people may have been impersonating them. So like a latter day Stephen Glass, it’s quite possible that both of these companies and all the people involved may be one dude in his basement with a half dozen burner phones.
A slight wrinkle to the story is that, reading between the lines, it’s possible that SoCal may have started out as a legitimate operation and then been taken over by fraudsters. But that’s still unclear.
The surest bet for this whole thing still seems to be Jack Sims, a Republican operative from Florida who is a prolific operator on right-wing spaces. But we probably need to be open to the possibility that he may not actually exist.
