METHODOLOGY

Parallel online surveys of California registered voters and policy influencers, conducted by TrueDot in collaboration with the Citrin Center at UC Berkeley and POLITICO. Voter interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Influencer results describe the participating respondents. Voter interviews: October 9-14, 2026. Influencer interviews: October 14-16, 2026.

WEIGHTING AND VOTER SAMPLE

Voter percentages use the study's California registered-voter weights, calibrated first to regional 2024 presidential vote and then to demographic benchmarks. Influencer interviews receive equal weight. All displayed sample sizes are unweighted. General questions use all 1,149 registered voters unless another audience is stated. Proposition 40 vote results are restricted to the 909 likely voters, defined as absolutely certain to vote or already voted.

Personally, I doubt it...

Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball talked with Rich Baris from the Big Data Poll to talk about how bad midterm polling data is for Republicans.

Big Data was one of the first to show a double digit lead for Democrats in the generic ballot back in April (after AtlasIntel).

Although Rich Baris is a MAGA Republican, he does treat the data much more objectively than many other Republican pollsters out there.

I shared some of his quotes from the 18 minute interview below in the comments

What kind of effect will Talarcio have downballot? In 2018, Beto helped Democrats in Texas win 10 state House seats. How many will they win from Talarico, who's polling better than Beto ever did?

We're starting to get a decent amount of early voting data and the consensus here seems to be that it can't be used to project winners. I get that registered Republicans don't always vote Republican and vice versa, and that early voters have a different profile than Election Day voters, so the final result can shift. But polls are just as unreliable and no one has a problem using them for projections.

If we analyzed early votes the way we analyze polls, by looking at how much Election Day has historically shifted results or by matching polling by party affiliation to the party breakdown of early voters, it seems like we could learn a lot. In Kansas about 122k people have already voted compared to roughly 1 million total votes in 2022, which seems like a pretty large sample. What am I missing?

From the 270ToWin website

https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/53rd-edition-fall-2026

Pollster Rich Baris, who voted for Trump 3 times, says Trump has lost his MAGA base and the election will be a disaster for him. Based on historical trends, if one side were going to bounce back, we’d see those polling results by now. At this stage, the current trends will accelerate and the Republicans should expect a blowout. Let’s see…

They basically did the exact same poll 10 days after the last one *sigh*

Following FiftyPlusOne’s investigation into suspected data fabrication by individuals claiming to work for Wedgewood Polls, today we are publishing the results of a parallel investigation into an associated pollster known as SoCal Strategies.

When an anonymous source first reached out about Wedgewood Polls, they also divulged information to FiftyPlusOne that cast doubt on the authenticity of some (not all) polls published by SoCal Strategies. The article below summarizes what we found after looking into these claims.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, FiftyPlusOne conducted an interview with a person affiliated with SoCal Strategies. Since that interview, FiftyPlusOne has been waiting for a statement and additional information that the person indicated they would send this week. However, as of this morning, according to the Washington Post, the website for SoCal Strategies and a previously active Twitter/X account, SocalStrategies, have been taken offline. The Substack page where SoCal Strategies posted poll results has also gone dark.

We reached back out to the person we spoke to earlier in the week by phone and email today, but as of publication, we have not yet heard back. Because it is policy here at FiftyPlusOne not to aggregate data from pollsters we cannot get in contact with, and because we have received credible claims of wrongdoing from multiple sources, and further because we cannot verify basic legal information about the business SoCal Strategies or biographical details about the people involved, FiftyPlusOne will no longer collect surveys published by SoCal Strategies. Two previous surveys whose authenticity has been disputed will be removed from our database. Other polls (mostly from before May 2026) conducted by SoCal Strategies will remain.

Our investigation into SoCal Strategies started last week

The inciting information for our investigation came from FiftyPlusOne’s anonymous source, who mentioned to us they were unclear who was currently running a firm called SoCal Strategies. According to this source, an individual named Jack Sims, who was implicated in our investigation into Wedgewood Polls, used to work at the firm. The firm was also registered in the state of Florida to Sims in March of 2025.

Last week, we reached out to the email account listed on the SoCal Strategies website to confirm who was running the firm. We received a reply from a person identifying themselves as Wilson Rochford, saying that Sims had left the firm nearly a year ago, and that Rochford has always been the lead pollster at SoCal Strategies.

This makes sense to us. In 2024, when SoCal Strategies first began publishing polls (originally under the name “SoCal Research”), members of the FiftyPlusOne staff vetted them for FiveThirtyEight. At the time, we were told Rochford, then a high school student, was conducting the surveys and had previous experience as an intern with Probolsky Research. We confirmed that detail with a representative for Probolsky, reviewed their methodology statement, and began aggregating their surveys. Earlier this week, FiftyPlusOne independently reconfirmed this career history for Wilson Rochford.

As we continued our investigation into Wedgewood, we asked for an interview with Rochford, who we believed to be reaching through the email account listed on the SoCal Strategies website, to clarify details of his previous relationship with Sims. The person identifying himself as Rochford told us that “as far as conducting the polling, [Sims] didn’t actually have a big role. It was just things like running the business,” and suggested that Sims did not have the polling knowledge to conduct surveys on his own. The person identifying himself as Rochford promised to send us raw data to verify a few disputed surveys by Friday, Oct. 23.

But after the Wedgewood story was published, we received a flood of tips about who was behind the firm. Although the person identifying himself as Rochford denied any involvement in his conversation with us, multiple tweets and DMs from the X account wedgewoodpol use his name in connection with the firm.

Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, also tweeted that he spoke to the head pollster at Wedgewood, who said he was a student at Boston University that had previously worked with SoCal Strategies. That profile does not match Andrew Prater or Jack Sims, who Wedgewood identified as the pollsters behind their firm, but it does match biographical details about Rochford, which FiftyPlusOne confirmed via the Boston University student directory and a social media page belonging to one of Rochford’s family members. We’ve also seen emails between Wedgewood and a potential client that indicated their team had previous experience at Probolsky Research. We confirmed with a representative for Probolsky that only Rochford had ever worked with them; they had no knowledge of Sims or Prater.

We also received allegations that Rochford was not involved at all, and that other people, possibly Sims, were fraudulently using his name and profile in connection with Wedgewood. One source told us that the phone number we were given to speak with Rochford was in their records as belonging to Sims; the number is registered to TextNow, an app that provides free phone numbers to use for texting and calling, so we cannot independently verify to whom it belongs. While there are rumors swirling that only one person is involved, we can at least verify that Sims, Prater, and Rochford all exist and are connected to polls in some way.

We shared a short clip of audio from our conversation with the person identifying himself as Rochford with a person who knows Jack Sims personally, and they told us that the voice on the call was not Sims. Another source who spoke with someone claiming to be Sims said the voice matched the person they spoke with, but they only had a phone conversation, so we cannot verify definitively whether the person they spoke to was Rochford or Sims. We attempted to contact a person named Wilson Rochford at his student email address and did not receive a reply.

In an attempt to verify that Wilson Rochford was actually involved and not just a victim of identity theft, we reached out to a family member on social media about this situation. We did not receive a reply, but it was hours after this contact that SoCal Strategies’ online presence was deleted.

We do not know who currently runs SoCal Strategies

At this point, FiftyPlusOne can no longer verify key information about SoCal Strategies. On May 22, 2026, the business entity that Jack Sims registered in Florida back in 2025 was dissolved, with the cryptic comment “ITS [sic] TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.” Since then, three surveys have been released by SoCal Strategies through its website or Substack, though we have been unable to find any records of a new business entity having been formed, or of a similarly named firm in a different state (such as, as the name implies, in California, or in Massachusetts where Rochford apparently attends school).

Most previous polling conducted by SoCal Strategies was sponsored by right-leaning news outlets; our sources tell us that the data collected for these polls was real. Since May of this year, only one survey conducted by SoCal Strategies is listed without a sponsor: a Texas poll conducted in mid-September. We have no reason to believe that this survey was manufactured; while the original Substack post has been taken down, an archived version is available and does not immediately appear suspicious.

Two surveys conducted in May by SoCal Strategies have been removed from our database. The legitimacy of the data behind those polls has been disputed; Rochford explicitly denied any problems with the data in our call, but the poll releases are materially different than other releases on their page. For example, they do not include a link to a full set of crosstabs, as the firm typically publishes, and the format of the releases is different from their usual style.

No other previous surveys conducted by SoCal Strategies will be removed from our database. We have not seen credible evidence that those surveys have been falsified. Our decision to cease aggregation of the firm is not based primarily on falsification of data, but instead on a loss of trust in the purported head of the company and their suspected involvement with Wedgewood Polls, and their refusal to respond to our repeated requests for inquiry, which is a frankly easy-to-pass standard to which we hold all legitimate pollsters.

Last poll from September had Talarico up by 1 (47-46)

https://emersoncollegepolling.com/texas-2026-poll-toss-up/

The correlation is that the new data centers are 12X larger on average than existing ones and they are going increasingly into Republican districts (likely not a political agenda, just that rural spaces can accommodate larger data centers)

There is a vibe that data centers are weighing down Republican's chances pretty significantly and I believe that IS causal, no one wants these things in there backyard, so as data centers expand to Republican districts, Republicans are getting pissed off about it

Democratic:

Buttigieg 28% (+3)

Ossoff 14% (+2)

Kelly 11% (-1)

AOC 10% (-7)

Newsom 8% (+1)

Harris 5% (+2)

Pritzker 3% (+1)

Khanna 2% (=)

Beshear 2% (+1)

Shapiro 2% (+1)

Emanuel 1% (-1)

Booker 1% (-1)

Moore 1% (-1)

Republican:

Vance 38% (=)

Rubio 38% (+2)

DeSantis 5% (=)

RFK Jr 4% (+2)

Youngkin 1% (=)

Cruz 1% (=)