My best guess at this point is that this was actually an attempt to manipulate betting markets and profit off of that

This is legit the first place my mind went when reading the headline. This should open them up to lawsuits.

It was to undermine Raman, the progressive, to push Bass as the centrist. It's part of a larger effort to cast progressive policies as unpopular. You can tell by the enormous (and obviously fake) margin they gave Bass.

Looks like it gets worse. They refuse to name the company directors, they've done the same thing in Wisconsin and Nevada, and they just shut down yesterday:

Median Strategies was a company which initially described itself as a pollster, and later as a "short term social experiment".[1][2] In August 2026, it released the purported results of public opinion polls for the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral election and the 2026 gubernatorial elections in Wisconsin and Nevada, and then a few days later retracted all of its releases, stating "[a]ll previously published polling releases have been withdrawn and should not be cited or treated as genuine polling data".[1][2][3]

The company acknowledged to reporters that the data was false, and following its admission, declared on August 17, 2026 that it was shutting down.[1][2] In a written statement, the company said "Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification",[1][2] but contemporaneous reporting did not indicate whether this sequence of events was the company's plan all along, or whether any survey research had ever been conducted by the company.

Even before the company's admission, several polling aggregators had refused to include Median Strategies' purported results because they were released without basic and standard information needed for vetting polls (like the identities of the firm's directors), and Median Strategies did not respond to requests for that information.[3] The entities responsible for Median Strategies remained unknown in the aftermath of the revelation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_Strategies

Public what?

By showing the leftist as being in the lead, they might have convinced leftist voters that their votes weren't needed to secure the election of their preferred candidate.