Last week, a polling company got caught lying.
Median Strategies had released a poll showing Karen Bass with a twelve-point lead over Nithya Raman in the LA mayor’s race, picking up most of reality TV figure Spencer Pratt’s old support. It spread everywhere, because it was juicy, because it fit a narrative editors wanted to run. Then the company admitted the whole thing was fabricated — a “social experiment,” in their words, designed to test how a fake number could travel through the media ecosystem without anyone bothering to verify it first. The same firm had run an identical stunt in Wisconsin, showing a socialist gubernatorial candidate up twenty points. She lost her primary.
It was all fake, and it worked anyway, at least for a news cycle.
I keep coming back to that story not because Los Angeles is my beat, but because of what it proves: a fabricated number, dressed up as data, can move real votes if nobody checks it before it runs. New Hampshire likes to think of itself as immune to that kind of thing. We’re “First in the Nation.” We pride ourselves on being first to pass certain laws — including laws tied directly to elections and to how victims are treated inside the criminal justice system.
So I went looking for our own version of the Median Strategies story. I found one. It doesn’t involve a fake poll. It involves real phone calls, a real state filing, and an Attorney General’s office that spent a year building the talking points for a bill it was also supposed to be investigating complaints about.
The Calls
In the spring of 2018, New Hampshire state legislators started getting phone calls at home about a proposed constitutional amendment called Marsy’s Law — a victims’-rights measure that would eventually go to a House vote as CACR22.
State Representative Linda Kenison wrote to her entire caucus on April 25th, 2018. Her constituents, she said, had been called and told to contact her about the bill. The strategy backfired: once she explained what the amendment actually did, her constituents agreed with her position — against it. Her words, not mine: “I am getting increasingly angered by this deceitful practice.”
Two days later, that complaint didn’t stay inside the legislature. Amanda Grady Sexton, Director of Public Affairs for the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence — one of the organizations publicly supporting Marsy’s Law — forwarded Kenison’s entire email thread directly to Jane Young at the Attorney General’s office, asking her to route it to “the appropriate person.” Ten months later, WMUR reported the AG’s office was still investigating.
The People Writing the Answers
Here’s what nobody knew while that investigation was supposedly underway: months earlier, in January 2018, Sexton had already looped Jane Young into building the campaign’s public defense. Draft documents, response papers, coordination with Doug Beloof — Marsy’s Law’s own national policy advisor — all moving through the same channel. Beloof’s own cover note on one set of documents specified that the answers to public criticism were, in his words, “most of which were from the AG.”
A year later, in January 2019, Gordon MacDonald — then Attorney General, now Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court — was directly copied on an email about legislative strategy for a related victims’-rights bill, House Bill 705. That same email mentioned a national grant program from the National Crime Victim Law Institute, worth up to a million dollars, scored in part on how strong a state’s victims’-rights statutes were. The sender’s own word for it: “an incentive to keep up this important work.”
To be precise about what that document shows and what it doesn’t: it isn’t a literal quid pro quo. Nobody wrote “pass this bill and get this check.” What it shows is an Attorney General’s office actively shaping the legislative and public-messaging strategy for victims’-rights law, in the same breath as a grant opportunity explicitly framed as incentive to keep doing exactly that kind of work. Read that however you want. I’m just telling you what’s in the email.
The Money, Documented
This is the part I don’t have to characterize at all, because the state did it for me.
Marsy’s Law for New Hampshire filed its Statement of Receipts and Expenditures with the Secretary of State’s office on June 20th, 2018. Chairperson: Emilio Gonzalez. Treasurer: Andrew Biemer. Total receipts: $430,000.
Number of contributors: one.
Every dollar came from Henry Nicholas III of Aliso Viejo, California — listed occupation, “Philanthropist, Business Executive.” Five checks between February and May 2018: $50,000, $100,000, $100,000, $130,000, and $50,000. Not one New Hampshire dollar. Not one New Hampshire name on the receipts page. A California donor built this campaign, dollar for dollar, from three thousand miles away.
Now look at where the money went. Amanda Grady Sexton — the same Sexton coordinating messaging with the Attorney General’s office — was paid $15,000 in consulting fees on March 14th, $15,000 more on April 30th, and $15,000 more on May 17th. Forty-five thousand dollars in consulting fees alone, inside a single filing period, on top of separate reimbursements for food, travel, online advertising, and videography.
And Andrew Biemer — the campaign’s own Treasurer, the man whose signature is on the filing — paid himself $2,500 in consulting fees. Four separate times. Ten thousand dollars, from the account he was personally responsible for overseeing.
The Phones
Then there’s the line that made me stop scrolling.
June 7th, 2018. Paid to FLS Connect LLC, of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Amount: $49,686.94. Nature of expenditure: “Media - Phones.”
FLS Connect isn’t an obscure name if you follow political consulting — it’s a national phone-outreach firm, the kind of vendor campaigns hire when they need to make calls at scale.
I want to be exactly as careful here as the document allows me to be. The filing does not say this money paid for the specific calls Linda Kenison and her colleagues complained about. It doesn’t name the recipients, and I’m not going to imply it does. What I can tell you is the timing: in the same election cycle, during the same window state legislators were calling the calls they received “deceitful,” the Marsy’s Law campaign’s own state filing shows nearly fifty thousand dollars paid to a company whose entire business is making phone calls.
Maybe that’s coincidence. Maybe it’s the first time anyone’s put the complaint and the receipt in the same room. I’ll let you decide which.
Why This Matters Now
None of what’s above is a theory. It’s a signed, dated filing, received by the New Hampshire Department of State, sitting in public records the whole time. Nobody had to leak it. Nobody had to hack anything. It was always there, waiting for someone to actually read it against the legislators’ own emails from the same season.
That’s the real lesson from the Median Strategies story, and it’s the same lesson New Hampshire keeps almost teaching itself: institutions don’t self-report, and journalists don’t get credit for asking questions — they get credit for reading the documents nobody else bothered to pull.
As a new election season and legislative session come back around, this is exactly the moment to ask who’s calling your house, who’s writing the talking points defending the bill behind those calls, and who’s paying for both. New Hampshire likes to go first. It’s worth checking, every so often, what we’re actually leading on.
Receipts over vibes. Omnia Vincit Virtus.
Listen to the full episode of the Gracie Gato Podcast, “Behind the Curtain of Electioneering,” wherever you get your podcasts.
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