A poll released last week claiming that Mayor Bass was leading Councilmember Nithya Raman by nearly 12 points in the Los Angeles mayoral race has been exposed as fake.
Median Strategies, which was behind the poll, told the Los Angeles Times it was a social experiment to see how unverified information spreads.
The supposed survey claimed to include about 560 L.A. voters.
Bass promoted the results on her socials before deleting the post once it was found to be fake.
Professor Dan Schnur of UC Berkeley told KNX News’ Craig Fiegener it’s a “peculiar story all the way around.”
“Most players in L.A. politics don't know much about the firm that sponsored the poll,” he said. “The fact that there was no backup provided to the news media or to the campaigns about it gives even more suspicion, and the fact that there's not a great deal of more traditional and more reliable polling to be done left a vacuum, where something like this could get a lot more attention than it deserved Add it all up and it's a tremendous sideshow in a campaign that ought to be concentrating on other things.”
Schnur said Bass’ campaign’s reaction to the poll could be interpreted in one of two ways.
“Either less likely that they have polling that shows Bass leading by a similar margin, and if that were the case, we probably would have seen and heard about those polls quite a bit by now,” he said. “More probable that this is a campaign that is so starved for positive information that when they saw a poll, even from a very dubious source, giving them a lead of this size, they leapt on it because they haven't had a lot of other good news to point to recently.”
Bass’ campaign said bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted.
Raman’s campaign responded in a statement calling it “the latest example of an administration that too often struggles to get the basics right.”
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