LA Mayor Karen Bass Touted Poll Showing Her With Massive Lead in General Election -- Turns Out It Was a Deliberate Fraud
For those of you with short memories, please keep this in mind: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was, at one point, potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency.
In the summer of 2020, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was effectively told to pick a black woman as his running mate; to do so would be the only way to appropriately respond to the George Floyd moment.
This narrowed his search down to three candidates: Bass, then a member of the U.S. House, former Obama-era national security advisor Susan Rice, and Sen. Kamala Harris.
We all know how that ended up, and while Kamala’s portrait will be featured in the dictionary next to the phrase “buyer’s remorse,” she was arguably the best pick. Bass was passed over at the time because she had close ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Church of Scientology, which were more issues of optics than of competence.
She then went on to become mayor of Los Angeles and proved that she had serious issues of competence, as well.
She’s now locked in a tight race with Nithya Raman, a socialist Los Angeles City Council member. But not too tight, Bass’ people wanted you to know. Last week, she was touting a survey showing her up 50 percent to 39 percent, with a margin of error of 4.1 percent.
“Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” read the caption on social media touting the poll.
The post has since been deleted, since it turns out the poll was a complete fake — and it was designed to show how easily the polling game can be rigged.
LA Times: Karen Bass cheered the results after the fake survey was released last week.
“Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” Bass posted on Twitter from her campaign account, citing Median Strategies as the source.
The post has since been… https://t.co/oLnUTIK7A4 pic.twitter.com/UbJjq6ZBQr
— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) August 17, 2026
From The Hill:
A poll released earlier this month claiming Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had a wide lead over Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman in the city’s mayoral race was bogus, according to the company that released it.
Median Strategies on Monday said in its announcement about the mayoral race poll that it has stopped its polling project. Their poll showed Bass ahead by nearly 12 points, citing the response of 560 Angelenos and with a 4.1 percent margin of error.
“Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls,” the company’s website states. “All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data. Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.”
Here’s how I’m imagining Karen Bass responding to this one:
‘Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent whilst their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire department’s budget?
@skydavidblevins questions the mayor of LA, Karen Bass, as she faces backlash regarding the California wildfires.https://t.co/Nkz8onjC7V pic.twitter.com/WwRwp6Imqz— Sky News (@SkyNews) January 8, 2025
But that’s just her returning from Ghana to oversee the mismanagement of a wildfire that claimed dozens of lives and destroyed thousands of structures. Completely different. Maybe she’ll just stare off into the distance for a few seconds this time.
The veracity of the poll, or lack thereof, was discovered when the Los Angeles Times made what it termed “repeated inquiries” of Median Strategies and its polling data in the race.
“We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews,” the company said in a statement.
This becomes a bit more interesting when you factor in that Median was one of the polling sources that showed nutcase socialist Francesca Hong up by a massive margin in the Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, which she lost by a slim margin. Median had her up by over 20 points.
“We got Wisconsin wrong — and by quite a margin too,” the firm posted on Aug. 12, one day before it released the Bass-Raman poll.
What’s funny is that the shadowy group initially said it existed to solve the very issue it exposed.
“Polling has a credibility problem. Ours is the fix: no partisan clients, no campaign or party money, numbers that go wherever the data takes them even when it’s inconvenient. Trustworthy polling, rebuilt,” Median said in its first post on X.
I’ll buy the “inconvenient” part, particularly given Karen Bass’ record on being reliable. As it so often occurs in politics, this couldn’t have happened to a better person.
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