Free Republic

An admission from Markos Moulitsas, proprietor of the Daily Kos web empire: I have just published a report by three statistics wizards showing, quite convincingly, that the weekly Research 2000 State of the Nation poll we ran the past year and a half was likely bunk. Later, he writes, "While the investigation didn't look at all of Research 2000 polling conducted for us, fact is I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else. I ask that all poll tracking sites remove any Research 2000 polls commissioned by us from their databases. I hereby...

Okay, I just got off the phone with a lawyer for DailyKos, and he gave me a bunch of interesting new detail about the lawsuit Kos is going to file against the polling outfit Research 2000. The gist: This is likely to be a serious lawsuit that is going to flush a lot out into the open, and prompt a serious discussion about what news orgs should be doing to vet polling data they commission. In case you missed it, DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas today revealed that he was preparing to sue Research 2000, which Kos has commissioned polling from...

For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their "transparency", since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent...