A major polling aggregator has permanently banned data from The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI) following allegations that the firm manipulated survey responses and hid its financial relationship with a Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate, according to reports from the Daily Wire.
FiftyPlusOne, a prominent polling aggregation platform, announced on Thursday that it would remove all polls released by TPSI after the company admitted to fabricating “vote-choice data for select respondents.” The aggregator noted that this fabrication “appears to have boosted the poll numbers of the political candidate that paid TPSI for polling services.”
The move comes just a week after a fake polling firm, Median Strategies, admitted it had disseminated fraudulent polling figures in an effort to test how unverified political data spreads across social media.
TPSI’s Ties to Fishback Campaign
According to FiftyPlusOne, TPSI was paid $1,575 by the campaign of James Fishback, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida, on June 9 under the memo “Polling/survey.” Despite this payment, TPSI released polls on June 10, June 30, and August 13 without disclosing the campaign’s sponsorship. In its August 13 poll, TPSI even included a statement asserting that no candidate, campaign, party committee, or outside organization had sponsored, commissioned, or paid for the research.
Those undisclosed polls painted a rosy picture for Fishback’s campaign. The June 10 poll showed Fishback in second place with 27% support, and the June 30 poll had him tying with Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) for first place at 32%. The final pre-election poll from TPSI showed Fishback at 29%, just five points behind Donalds.
But when Florida Republicans cast their ballots in the primary, the results were starkly different. Fishback finished third with just over 10% of the vote, far behind Donalds at 48% and Lt. Governor Jay Collins at 25%.
Ethical Violations and Reaction
FiftyPlusOne stated that it received a tip “late last week” alleging that TPSI had published campaign internals for the Fishback campaign without disclosing the funding, which it said was “in explicit violation of our ethical standards for pollsters.”
After the primary, TPSI released an accuracy review in which it took responsibility for omitting its funding source but strongly denied manipulating or fabricating raw data. The firm claimed its usual methodology matched the final primary results within a small margin of error. However, it acknowledged that analysts altered the last forecast by using an experimental modeling framework called the “Coalition Expectation Overlay,” which assumed the panel was undercounting younger voters and suspected an issue with voters backing Collins.
The controversy has drawn criticism from polling experts. Austin Park, co-founder and head of research at VoteHub, pointed out the irony of TPSI’s actions so soon after the American Association for Public Opinion Research issued a statement on fabricated polling following the Median Strategies incident. “Disappointing to see TPSI effectively fabricate their data as well,” Park said, adding that TPSI had already been excluded from VoteHub averages for several months.
In a related move, FiftyPlusOne placed data from Patriot Polling on temporary suspension over concerns about undisclosed campaign sponsorships in the same primary.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/pollster-funded-by-james-fishback-accused-of-manipulating-data-before-blowout-loss