Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.
Three purported polls of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the Wisconsin primary for governor and the Nevada governor’s race turned out to be entirely fake — a “short-term social experiment,” according to the website that released them. The fakery’s discovery, by The Los Angeles Times, came only after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles posted approvingly about one of the polls, which showed her ahead.
Another pollster acknowledged that in a survey of Florida’s primary for governor, it had shifted some respondents’ support from the candidate they had said they backed to another candidate because the initial results “did not align with our read of the race.” (None of the polls above were included in The New York Times’s poll trackers or coverage because they did not meet its basic transparency and professionalism standards.)
All of this is happening at the dawn of the 2028 presidential primary season, when dozens of candidates are likely to be defined in part by polls that cement impressions and set narratives that may not be tethered to political reality.
“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”
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While betting-market odds are often based on the wisdom of crowds and opaque measurements, they are amplified by powerful companies and reported on by legitimate news organizations that in some cases have financial partnerships with the prediction firms. CNN has such an arrangement with Kalshi and regularly shows the prediction market’s betting odds on television. The Wall Street Journal’s parent company has a partnership with Polymarket to display its odds within Journal content.
Voters and donors now see those numbers, which can be manipulated by all manner of polling and news events, and use them as a proxy for how a candidate is faring.
Sean Clegg, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who is likely to run for president in 2028, said prediction markets had a growing influence on Democratic strategists, donors and primary voters.
“Momentum is everything and poll numbers move prediction markets, which influences strategic voting,” Mr. Clegg said. “The progressive subset of the political class is hyper online, and they are pushing these polling narratives like never before.”
