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WASHINGTON — When Mandela Barnes dropped out of the Wisconsin governor’s race two weeks before the Democratic primary, he declared, “It has become very clear who our nominee is going to be.”

He meant Francesca Hong, who had a commanding lead in polls — not David Crowley, who ended up narrowly winning the nomination.

Politicians like Barnes have relied on public and private surveys of voters’ views to guide their decisions for as long as pollsters have sought to measure public opinion. But in this year’s midterm contests, misleading polling has shaped campaign narratives, donor behavior, and news coverage like never before.

Polls are traditionally used to measure public opinion, not mold it. But this year, several Democratic campaigns have seized on unreliable polls to push the perception that their candidates are surging to try to solidify support, attract donors, and scare off rivals.

The rise of prediction markets has also created financial incentives for untrustworthy or even fake political polls at a moment when it has become even more expensive and difficult to conduct high-quality public opinion surveys.

Some Republicans — particularly President Donald Trump — have for years pointed to dubious polling to advance their political goals, but the phenomenon has become far more acute in Democratic primaries this year. In recent weeks, questionable surveys have created confusion and warped perceptions of the results of key primaries for the party.

In Michigan’s primary for Senate, polls fueled a widespread belief that Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, was a major underdog to Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive. After she voted on primary day, the first question she faced from reporters was about how El-Sayed built such a large polling lead. She ended up losing by just a percentage point.

In Wisconsin’s primary for governor, polls that consistently showed Hong ahead by double digits created an air of inevitability around her nomination. When she lost, it was viewed as a stunning upset.

“After seeing the polls, I think everybody would have called me the underdog,” Crowley said. “During this race, I had to be a little bit recklessly optimistic.”

The polling world has also been rocked by recent revelations of made-up surveys and sketchy practices.

Three purported polls of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the Wisconsin primary for governor, and the Nevada governor’s race turned out to be entirely fake — a “short-term social experiment,” according to the website that released them. The fakery’s discovery, by the Los Angeles Times, came only after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles posted approvingly about one of the polls, which showed her ahead.

Another pollster acknowledged that in a survey of Florida’s primary for governor, it had shifted some respondents’ support from the candidate they had said they backed to another candidate because the initial results “did not align with our read of the race.” (None of the polls above were included in the New York Times’ poll trackers or coverage because they did not meet its basic transparency and professionalism standards.)

All of this is happening at the dawn of the 2028 presidential primary season, when dozens of candidates are likely to be defined in part by polls that cement impressions and set narratives that may not be tethered to political reality.

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”

‘Double digit down — it cannot be!’

In Michigan, the last eight public polls of Democratic voters found El-Sayed leading Stevens by double digits.

In an interview this past week, Stevens said she never believed the race was the blowout that the polls predicted. She won key late endorsements from figures including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a popular Democrat.

But the polling unquestionably shaped how the contest was perceived. El-Sayed, whose advisers privately predicted a big victory, was so confident that the weekend before the primary, he was pictured hanging out with social media influencers poolside at a party.

Stevens sent the Times a memo about her experience dealing with polling that did not reflect the reality of the race.

“At first the double digit down polls leading up to the election spooked me and potentially had the ability to paralyze,” she wrote. “But then after chewing on them,” she added, “I came to realize, NO WAY! Double digit down — it cannot be!”

In the interview, she attributed the polling miss to an industry that has largely moved away from expensive “live caller” phone interviews with voters. Instead, most contemporary polling is done online or through texting, mediums likely to include more young people even though the voting electorate skews older. (Live-caller polls can be seriously flawed, too, and it is generally considered best to analyze surveys from a range of pollsters using a mix of methods.)

“Sometimes we miss the plot with all the tweets and all the polls and all the prediction market stuff,” Stevens said. “In this American democracy, it is still about the people voting, and that remains the purest and most incredible thing, and it likely captures the least amount of our attention.”

The odds of confusion: 100%

The biggest new phenomenon influencing how campaigns are viewed is the spread of prediction market data.

The day before Michigan’s primary, Kalshi gave El-Sayed a 97% chance of winning. The morning of Wisconsin’s primary, Polymarket gave Crowley a 3.6% chance of victory.

While betting-market odds are often based on the wisdom of crowds and opaque measurements, they are amplified by powerful companies and reported on by legitimate news organizations that in some cases have financial partnerships with the prediction firms. CNN has such an arrangement with Kalshi and regularly shows the prediction market’s betting odds on television. The Wall Street Journal’s parent company has a partnership with Polymarket to display its odds within Journal content.

Voters and donors now see those numbers, which can be manipulated by all manner of polling and news events, and use them as a proxy for how a candidate is faring.

Sean Clegg, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who is likely to run for president in 2028, said prediction markets had a growing influence on Democratic strategists, donors, and primary voters.

“Momentum is everything and poll numbers move prediction markets, which influences strategic voting,” Clegg said. “The progressive subset of the political class is hyper online, and they are pushing these polling narratives like never before.”

What can anyone do?

The modern polling industrial complex is a Wild West in which numbers often circulate online with little regard to whether they come from reliable sources.

“There is no polling cop,” John Anzalone, a prominent Democratic pollster who worked for former President Joe Biden, said of the proliferation of low-quality surveys that flood the market. The news media, he said, is “going to report on every poll that has a university or college on it,” regardless of its methods. “Bad in,” he said, “bad out.”

Both good and bad polls have real-world consequences, driving decisions about messaging, spending, and even whether to stay in a race. This spring, Gov. Janet Mills of Maine suspended her Senate campaign weeks before the Democratic primary, after low polling numbers starved her of money. The decision left Graham Platner to win the nomination without significant opposition. He later dropped out after a rape allegation that he denied.

The first 2028 Democratic presidential primary contest is set to be in South Carolina, where the electorate is dominated by older Black voters — the exact demographic that was most difficult to poll in both Michigan and Wisconsin.

Scott Huffmon, the director of the state’s long-running Winthrop Poll, said that like many other pollsters, he had abandoned live-caller surveys. “We just can’t afford it,” he said.

Polling problems may be less pronounced in the 2028 race, since presidential contests are easier to poll and produce more high-quality surveys. But the looming questions about how to accurately analyze the field in 2028 have left donors struggling with how to decide which candidates are worth the investment.

Few methods besides polling will be able to gauge who has popular support before the primaries begin in January 2028. But usually by the time voting begins, the field has been winnowed as candidates run out of money or perceive themselves to be lacking voter support.

“Given what’s happened over the last two weeks, the inaccurate polling really calls into question whether there’s any empirical value that donors can use to guide their giving,” said Shannon Hunt-Scott, a Democratic megadonor from California. “There’s going to be so many candidates and so many polls of variable quality. People will want to tout them and run around with them. The question is, will they have any real validity? You can’t know.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections.

One new ad in Texas begins with someone typing into a chatbot, “Why is my electric bill going up?” Another in Ohio blames one of the state’s Republican senators for a proliferation of data centers, calling them “a total scam.” And in top House battlegrounds in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the Democratic challengers are all running ads against the server warehouses powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Data centers have become unlikely fault lines in the broader fight over an AI revolution that is remaking the global economy and threatening to disrupt the job market. Now politicians are racing to tap into the backlash — or inoculate themselves — as political strategists in both parties described the issue as an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate, and governor’s mansions.

“It’s very much a bottom up, organic movement,” said Anna Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, who said that while people’s views on data centers were largely tied to how close they live to them, the facilities were also becoming symbols of the excesses of Silicon Valley.

“Data centers are a physical manifestation,” she said. “Billionaires are building them, and it feeds into all of the Big Tech skepticism that is there. It’s very symbolic of everybody’s issues with AI.”

There are signs that the emerging data center debate is scrambling the usual partisan divisions.

So far, Democrats have chiefly been the ones racing to harness voter anger about data centers over rising electricity prices, water use, and mistrust of the tech sector. They aim to punish Republicans for cozying up to industry by approving many of these projects.

But in recent weeks, a growing number of Republican candidates have scrambled to shield themselves from any fallout. They have voiced skepticism about data centers, despite President Donald Trump’s full-throated cheerleading for the AI industry and fears among party leaders in Washington that blocking construction of the centers could slow the economy and make the United States less competitive against China.

Some Republicans are now using “data center” as an epithet, and casting themselves as the real opponents of corporate tax breaks and unfettered construction. Last week, Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in the key swing state of Michigan, said that he supports a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

Polls show a revolt brewing against data centers. A Gallup poll conducted in March showed 71% opposed local construction of the centers, and a summer survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the number of people opposing new data centers in their areas had risen by 12 percentage points since February and March.

The fallout has been so swift that in some races, including the governor’s contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida, both Democrats and Republicans are airing television ads about data centers.

On Wednesday, a remarkable memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data center politics was endangering Sen. Jon Husted (R., Ohio). His challenger, Sherrod Brown, the state’s former Democratic senator, has aired millions of dollars worth of ads, calling Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo said.

The one-page document, which was earlier reported by Axios, amounted to a desperate plea for the well-heeled industry to finance an advertising campaign — lest a Husted loss serve as “a cautionary lesson” for politicians elsewhere.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, said that opposing data centers offered Democrats a rare chance to make inroads in rural areas and small towns that are resisting the developments.

“It absolutely shakes up the snow globe on the partisan coalitions in a part of the world where Republicans have been dominant,” he said. “It’s one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.”

In Florida, Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, spent more than $2 million on one ad in his primary, vowing to “protect” the state from data centers that “jack up utility rates.” In the ad, he tried to cast that position as standing with Trump, whose administration sought to blunt some of the opposition earlier this year by proposing a “ratepayer protection pledge,” in which data centers promise not to drive up electricity costs.

His Democratic opponent in the fall, David Jolly, said, “We don’t want crime or data centers in our neighborhoods” in one of his first ads of the general election.

In a sign of how top-of-mind data centers have become, Donalds brought up the topic unprompted at an event this month in Naples, Fla. “Listen, I know people have concerns,” he said. “I’ve seen the polling. But leadership isn’t just looking at polling.”

He then tried to thread the needle between selling the importance of artificial intelligence for the United States’ competitive future and addressing boiling anger at local data centers. “I don’t want it near your home, just like I don’t want it near my home,” Donalds said.

Jolly’s position is less complicated. In an interview Thursday, he said Florida should impose a moratorium on data center construction until the full impacts could be studied.

The fierceness of the mounting opposition has startled some in the tech sector.

“This is a powder keg,” warned Chamath Palihapitiya, a public-facing venture-capital investor, in a post on the social platform X last week, responding to the dire warning in the NRSC memo. He wrote that the AI industry had “failed miserably in doing the basics” of selling itself.

Political strategists and pollsters in both parties said that voters have linked the facilities to concerns over higher electricity prices, water use, the fate of farmlands, and general fears about the advent of artificial intelligence and Big Tech.

“They didn’t do a good enough job explaining anything,” Ryan James Girdusky, a Republican political strategist and podcaster, said of the industry.

In Texas, the Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico, and for governor, Gina Hinojosa, have held recent events about data centers, accusing their Republican rivals of pocketing data center donations while backing expansions.

“Texans are mad,” Hinojosa said in an interview. “It is hard to convey what feels like an invasion by data centers with no rules, no laws to protect Texas. They’re popping up everywhere.”

It was her advertisement that featured a chatbot being asked about the cause of rising electricity prices. The answer it provides? Blaming Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and data centers.

Even before that ad, Abbott had been shifting his stance on data centers. Less than a year ago, Abbott bragged that Google’s $40 billion investment made Texas “the epicenter of AI development,” bringing both construction jobs and tax revenues.

But this summer he announced new standards for data centers on water use and electricity and called to end some tax incentives. This month he directed the state’s utility commission to audit all data centers seeking permits before they could move forward.

“Data center growth cannot come at the expense of Texans’ livelihoods,” said Catherine Frazier, a spokesperson for Abbott.

Abbott is hardly the only politician pivoting.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2028, had been a booster of AI investments. In June 2025, Shapiro said he was “proud” of Amazon’s $20 billion data center investment, bragging it would be the largest private sector investment in the state’s history.

On Tuesday, Shapiro signed an executive order imposing what he called the “strictest guardrails in the nation” to stop “predatory developers.”

“I’ve heard loud and clear from the people of Pennsylvania,” said Shapiro, who is up for reelection this year.

Now Shapiro has started airing a television ad attacking his Republican challenger, Stacy Garrity, as the “number one fan of data centers.” Garrity has her own ad hitting Shapiro for “data centers in our backyards,” but her campaign can afford only a small fraction of the airtime.

Another Republican candidate for governor running on data center politics is Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, who has attacked his Democratic rival as “Data Center David Crowley.” Crowley narrowly won the nomination over a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, who had demanded a data center moratorium.

Neither Crowley nor Tiffany has called for a moratorium.

Crowley has preferred to let local communities decide, with a number of guardrails and restrictions. Tiffany, who called data centers “exciting new technology” just a few months ago, is now calling for a repeal of tax incentives.

In Michigan, William Lawrence, a progressive activist, rode an anti-data center message to win the Democratic nomination for a key Michigan House seat this month and then immediately made a general election ad targeting Rep. Tom Barrett, the Republican incumbent, on the issue.

Barrett campaigned Tuesday with House Speaker Mike Johnson in Michigan, who warned that, while “community concerns” needed to be accounted for, “a broad moratorium against data centers is kind of a dangerous prospect right now.”

The next day Barrett began airing a new data center ad of his own, in which he claimed that “I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers.”

In an interview, Lawrence, who supports a moratorium, called the ad “outrageous” and said voters would not be satisfied with half measures. Data center opposition, he said, was “number one in terms of intensity” in the district.

“It’s bringing together three-time Trump voters, anti-vaxxers, environmentalists, independents, nonvoters, people who are in our cities, people who are in the rural areas,” Lawrence said. “And it’s bringing together all these people because none of us trust Big Tech to do right by our communities.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.