A 21-year-old has come forward as the mastermind behind a series of fake polls that made their way into legitimate media coverage this year, admitting the whole thing was an experiment to see how easily phony data could slip into the political conversation.
Rahil Prakash told The Guardian that he created a website called Median Strategies and released fabricated polls for the Wisconsin governor’s Democratic primary, the Los Angeles mayoral race, and two statewide races in Nevada. The goal, he said, was simple: test whether fake polls could fool the media and the public.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Prakash told the outlet. “And as it turned out, it could.”
His inspiration came from the Michigan primary, where polls badly missed the mark in the Democratic race between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. El-Sayed won by a narrow margin despite polls showing him up by double digits. That discrepancy planted the idea in Prakash’s mind that polling was ripe for manipulation.
Once Median Strategies was up and running, its bogus data found traction quickly. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass touted a Median poll that showed her leading her challenger by more than ten points. The California Post cited the poll, and a widely followed polling aggregator on X shared Median’s Nevada numbers.
“Did I expect it to perhaps expedite in the way it did? Most definitely not. I did not expect the California political press to pick it up on their own,” Prakash said. He went on to apologize directly to the campaigns of Bass, Nithya Raman, and Francesca Hong.
The fake poll in Wisconsin’s primary had put Hong ahead by 20 points. She lost by half a point.
What makes this episode especially awkward for the polling industry is that Median’s fake numbers weren’t even the most inflated. Marquette, a well-known and supposedly legitimate pollster, had Hong ahead by 22 points. PPP showed her up by 18.
That raises an uncomfortable question: if a fake poll and established pollsters produced similarly off-base results, what exactly is the difference between them? At least Median admits its polling is fake, as Breitbart’s John Nolte noted. The same cannot be said for some mainstream outlets and pollsters whose methods remain opaque but whose results are treated with reverence.
The episode underscores a growing skepticism about polling’s role in modern politics. Several credible polling organizations refused to aggregate Median’s data because they could not verify its methodology, but that didn’t stop others from picking it up and broadcasting it as news.
Prakash’s confession is a reminder that the media’s hunger for polls—real or otherwise—creates an opening for mischief. It also feeds a broader narrative that polling has become less about measuring public opinion and more about shaping it.
“This guy did us a favor. He further damaged the credibility of polling and of the media. That’s a wonderful thing as far as I’m concerned,” Nolte wrote in a column that gleefully highlighted the absurdity of the situation.
Whether you see Prakash as a prankster or a warning sign, one thing is clear: the fake-poll era is not just a possibility—it’s already here.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/08/21/nolte-21-year-old-was-behind-fake-polling-firm-median-strategies/