Polling Company Goes Dark as Investigative Report Suggests They’re Yet Another Fake

(Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

The polling company SoCal Strategies appears to have been exposed as another fake outfit, as the company’s online presence went dark in the midst of a bombshell investigation.

Polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne dropped a lengthy report on Thursday bringing into question multiple surveys put out by SoCal Strategies, as well as who exactly is running the company.

FiftyPlusOne had also recently conducted an investigation into Wedgewood Polling. With that investigation set to expose them, Wedgewood admitted that their polling had been fake and was part of a social experiment and criticism of modern polling and reporting.

The same tipster who went to FiftyPlusOne about Wedgewood had also mentioned SoCal Strategies, which has some mysterious connections to Wedgewood.

Jack Sims, who was identified in the Wedgewood investigation, used to work at SoCal, and the polling firm was registered to him last year in Florida.

Things got weirder from there once FiftyPlusOne tried getting to the bottom of SoCal’s leader.

Researchers for FiftyPlusOne appeared to be talking to Wilson Rochford, who has worked as an intern with Probolsky Research, at one point, and who was identified as the lead pollster with SoCal.

According to the report, there have been 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.”

The report continues:

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.

It was hours after that attempt to confirm Rochford’s role that SoCal’s website and social media accounts went dark. FiftyPlusOne has been unable to reach anyone despite communicating with someone on October 20.

Making the situation even more bizarre, Sims in May dissolved the business entity he registered in 2025 and left the odd comment, “ITS [sic] TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.” Three more surveys have been released since then.

Two polls from SoCal are now being removed from FiftyPlusOne.

“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,” the report reads.

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