FiftyPlusOne is not the polls police. However, we do, from time to time, make the tough decision to exclude a pollster from our data collection, aggregation, and forecasting when we lose faith in the process a firm uses to gather and generate its polling results. We believe that a trustworthy aggregator must republish only data which (a) it can verify was produced by a scientific process of opinion polling and (b) comes from organizations that are conducting research ethically in the pursuit of honestly measuring the public’s preferences.
To this end, we publish a set of methodological and ethical standards we apply to publicly released polls before surveys appear on our website. If a pollster fails to meet these standards, or refuses to answer our questions, we do not include their data in our work.
Today, FiftyPlusOne is permanently banning the use of any future data from The Public Sentiment Institute, and suspending the use of data from Patriot Polling until and unless they sufficiently respond to our methodological inquiries. We have discovered evidence that suggests both firms conducted surveys for political campaigns without disclosing their clients publicly. All surveys from each pollster that exist in our database at publication will be marked as partisan, as we cannot be confident they were conducted on a nonpartisan basis as the pollsters claim.
Additionally, we are permanently removing from our website all polls released by The Public Sentiment Institute, after the company admitted it fabricated vote-choice data for select respondents. This fabrication appears to have boosted the poll numbers of the political candidate that paid TPSI for polling services.
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1. Undisclosed partisan work
Late last week, FiftyPlusOne received a tip that TPSI had allegedly published campaign internals for the James Fishback campaign without disclosing that those polls were funded by a candidate. This is in explicit violation of our ethical standards for pollsters, which state, “Pollsters operating on behalf of a party, campaign, PAC, or other political client will clearly label their polls as such. Pollsters will clearly specify sponsorship on each poll.”
Because we flag for readers when polls are part of a campaign operation — and exclude pollsters who violate our public criteria from our site — we promptly went into investigation mode. In the course of that investigation, we identified a second pollster who may have engaged in similar activity.
We looked up public records on spending for the Fishback campaign, and uncovered the following facts.
On June 9, 2026, the Fishback campaign paid The Public Sentiment Institute $1,575, with the memo line “Polling/survey.” The Public Sentiment Institute later released two surveys of the Florida gubernatorial primary, on June 10, 2026 and June 30, 2026, neither of which includes any indication of sponsorship by any outside group.
On August 13, 2026, The Public Sentiment Institute released another survey of the Florida gubernatorial primary that included the statement “This survey was designed, funded and conducted by The Public Sentiment Institute. No candidate, campaign, party committee or outside organization sponsored, commissioned or paid for this research.”
On January 21, 2026, the Fishback campaign paid Lucca Ruggieri, CEO of Patriot Polling, $1,500, with the memo line “Polling.” On February 2, 2026, Patriot Polling released a survey of the Florida gubernatorial primary that does not include any indication of sponsorship by any outside group. To the contrary, the release includes the phrase “we have decided to conduct a head-to-head poll,” suggesting that the survey was conducted independently. The survey memo is written favorably toward Fishback.
On July 29, 2026, Patriot Polling released an internal survey of the Florida 2nd Congressional District general election, conducted on behalf of the Keith Gross campaign. An earlier Patriot Polling survey, released February 11, 2026, of the Florida 2nd Congressional District Republican primary election, did not disclose any sponsorship. We did not find any evidence of payments to Patriot Polling or Lucca Ruggieri in Gross’ FEC filings.
Last Friday, we reached out to Patriot Polling and The Public Sentiment Institute to ask whether any of the polls noted above were undisclosed campaign internals. We followed up with them this week but did not receive any additional information from the pollsters. We also contacted the Fishback and Gross campaigns with requests for comment and have not heard back.
Failure to disclose sponsorship doesn’t automatically mean we exclude a pollster from our database. There are a few other pollsters that have a history both of (a) answering our direct questions and (b) not including sponsorship information in their releases that we continue to aggregate. We simply treat all of their polls as partisan, even if they do not specify a partisan sponsor.
However, failing to respond to methodological inquiries renders a firm’s data unusable, since we cannot vet the pollster per our published methodological and ethical standards.
2. Manufacturing vote-choice data for individual respondents
After we finalized an original draft of this article that included just the findings of undisclosed partisanship above, The Public Sentiment Institute published a post-mortem of their Florida polls, which significantly overstated support for James Fishback relative both to other polls of the race and election results. The report concluded that their error was two-fold: First, TPSI says, they dramatically overestimated turnout among young voters. That is not a methods violation, as pollsters often make judgement calls about the expected electorate — but their second reason is.
TPSI admits that the firm changed the stated vote choice of certain respondents who favored a different candidate, current Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins, turning these respondents into supporters of James Fishback based on their belief that Fishback should have been polling higher. The report states:
Jay Collins was polling in the twenties in our data. That did not align with our read of the race, and we concluded it might reflect a data-quality problem specific to our text-message panel. Acting on that conclusion, we identified respondents who selected Collins but whose broader profile aligned with a competing coalition, and leaned those respondents toward James Fishback (emphasis ours).
This was the most consequential error in the project, and it was ours alone. … We reallocated real support away from a candidate (emphasis ours) on the basis of a suspicion that our own data contradicted. No survey methodology should permit a respondent’s stated preference to be reassigned because an analyst finds it implausible, and ours will not again.
This decision is an obvious violation of standard polling practices, which, as they themselves state, do not “permit a respondent’s stated preference to be reassigned because an analyst finds it implausible.” This decision is made all the more questionable by the undisclosed relationship between the pollster and the Fishback campaign.
FiftyPlusOne’s methodological and ethical standards include the following items:
All polls should have clear mechanisms in place to attempt to build a representative sample of the population or electorate. These mechanisms may vary; the most common is to weight the sample to a population benchmark, but other statistical or sampling techniques may also be used in place of or in addition to weighting to adjust the sample.
Pollsters will not knowingly select research tools or methods of analysis that yield misleading conclusions.
Pollsters will not falsify or fabricate data.
It is our opinion, as experts in aggregating and conducting polls, that switching individual-level vote-choice data in your poll to generate a result that is more in line with your “expectations” (and your preferred candidate) is tantamount to falsifying data, and that this behavior may have also been in violation of the other two standards cited here. We no longer have faith that TPSI is conducting honest research, and are permanently discontinuing use of its surveys. This specific poll will be removed from our database, as it was not conducted in a scientific manner.
These ethical issues coincidentally follow an instance of outright fabrication discovered earlier this week. A “polling” firm called Median Strategies, which appeared out of thin air two weeks ago and released “results” from a handful of “polls” across the country, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that its results were entirely fabricated as a “social experiment” designed to see how easy it would be to get the media and public to believe bogus data. It’s unclear if this was a real experiment or just the firm’s excuse after multiple organizations (including FiftyPlusOne) requested methodological information that it clearly did not have.
Responding to the Median Strategies story, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) released the following statement on Wednesday.
The American Association for Public Opinion Research, the leading association of public opinion and survey research professionals, strongly condemns the fabrication of data in any polling or public opinion research. Intentionally misleading the public is a serious breach of ethics and undermines legitimate polling and public opinion work.
Legitimate polls are based on responses from the public. [...]
“It is extremely disturbing that this organization produced and distributed fabricated data undermining trust in public opinion and election polling,” said Mary Losch, President of AAPOR. “Professional polling organizations are transparent, ethical, and work hard to provide critical information to the public and other stakeholders. It is important that we don’t conflate fraudulent activity like this with legitimate election polling.”
If that approach is good enough for AAPOR, it’s good enough for us. (In fact, our ethical standards are in part derived from AAPOR’s own Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.)
Responding to email outreach before this story was published, The Public Sentiment Institute produced the following comment:
At TPSI, we are committed to transparency and eager to clarify any inaccuracies or falsehoods.
Patriot Polling did not reply to multiple attempts at outreach.
At FiftyPlusOne, we only aggregate real surveys that we can verify
At FiftyPlusOne, our goal is to provide an accurate representation of what public opinion is on any given issue or election, as measured by methodologically transparent, honestly conducted polls. We take this mission seriously and go to great lengths to vet all pollsters that appear on our page. We do not maintain that pollsters have to be accurate (we can compensate for pollster (in)accuracy in our models), but firms do have to be able to convince us that they are real.
These standards are why, for example, FiftyPlusOne never aggregated so-called “polls” from Median Strategies. When we contacted them to ask questions about their methodology and company, they didn’t respond, so we didn’t republish their data on our site.
The polling industry and aggregates like ours are built on mutual trust. We can’t guarantee that everybody in this space is operating in good faith, but we do our best to vet new pollsters, have ongoing relationships and communication with many firms and sponsors, and hopefully maintain trust with our audience that the work we publish is legitimate. If pollsters do not respond when we have questions about how they generate their data, we cannot verify that legitimacy. And aggregating data we cannot verify would violate the trust that readers put in us.
The Public Sentiment Institute is now permanently banned, and Patriot Polling is now indefinitely suspended, from the FiftyPlusOne database, aggregates, models, and forecasts. Any future firms founded or managed by Lester Tellez or Dustin Smith (TPSI) are likewise banned, as are surveys sponsored by organizations affiliated with these individuals, such as On Point Politics. Future firms founded or managed by Lucca Ruggieri or Roberto Jay (Patriot Polling) are subject to the same suspension as Patriot Polling.
In keeping with historical tradition established at FiveThirtyEight, previous polls conducted by Patriot Polling will remain on our site, as they contain important context for understanding our polling averages at the time of their release, but all such surveys will be reclassified as partisan. If Patriot Polling responds to our methodological inquiries and sufficiently assures us these issues will not happen again, we will consider lifting their suspension and resuming collection of their polls.
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