A mysterious polling operation successfully deceived Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection campaign, manipulated election betting markets, and vanished almost immediately after its deception was exposed. The fabricated survey, claimed by the group Median Strategies to show Bass with a nearly 12-point lead over City Councilwoman Nithya Raman in the November mayoral runoff, was later admitted by the firm as entirely fictitious.

The operation began posting on August 9 with minimal social media presence but quickly gained traction when Bass’s campaign amplified the results—touting them as evidence of “gaining momentum”—before deleting the post following its exposure. Median Strategies described the entire effort as a short-term “social experiment” and admitted it had released at least three fake surveys covering races in California, Wisconsin, and Nevada.

The firm claimed to have surveyed 560 likely Los Angeles voters between July 30 and August 5, attaching professional-looking margins of error and presenting itself as an independent entity committed to polling credibility. However, the company refused to identify its operators or basic details about voter files, field vendors, or methodology—details that established aggregators like The New York Times and RealClearPolitics excluded from their platforms due to missing information.

The deception triggered immediate market activity: Kalshi’s contract predicting a Bass victory surged from 63 cents to 65 cents within 15 minutes of her campaign sharing the poll, while Polymarket saw approximately 20 accounts trade thousands of favorable contracts in six minutes. Median Strategies later claimed it had not traded on election prediction markets or received financial benefit, but its actions demonstrated how easily unverified polling data could spread and influence live elections when amplified by political actors.

The company stated the purpose was to test how unverified information could circulate, but its conduct—leveraging fabricated results from an anonymous operation to bolster a candidate’s perceived momentum—reveals dangerous gaps in election integrity. Bass’s campaign, with resources to verify data, chose to endorse the falsified numbers before correcting the error, cementing the central embarrassment: a sophisticated political entity failed basic due diligence while legitimizing a deceptive practice.