DailyKos Gets Burned… UPDATED

If you’re a conservative, it should come as no surprise that there are polling companies out there who will skew their results to push an agenda or cater to whoever is commissioning them to conduct a poll. One company who consistently came out with anti-conservative results over the years is Research2000. I remember a few times calling their polls crap on Twitter and elsewhere. I also remember being berated by liberals defending Research2000 saying that they were a reputable firm, they were non-partisan (it says so on their website), and they were consistently used by reputable organizations like DailyKos and TalkingPointsMemo. Yes, they really said it.

ANYWAY, today Markos Moulitsas (Kos of DailyKos) dropped a bombshell on the media world: Research2000 was full of it and they had statistical analysis to prove it.

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.

Since the moment Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman approached me, I took their concerns seriously and cooperated fully with their investigation. I also offered to run the results on Daily Kos provided that they 1) fully documented each claim in detail, 2) got that documentation peer reviewed by disinterested third parties, and 3) gave Research 2000 an opportunity to respond. By the end of last week, they had accomplished the first two items on that list. I held publication of the report until today, because I didn’t want to partake in a cliche Friday Bad News Dump. This is serious business, and I wasn’t going to bury it over a weekend.

Let’s give Kos some credit. He did the right thing and called these guys out publicly and has said he’s going to sue them. I do think, though, that this proves just how far out there the Left is to believe some of the results of these polls. We conservatives instinctively realized these polls were out of sync with reality. The Left didn’t even blink.

Regardless, to all the little minions who quoted the DailyKos polls, and all the major news organizations who also used the results in their reporting, I have one thing to say:

We. Told. You. So.

UPDATE!: Uh oh. Things have gotten interesting. The president of Research2000 fired back at the accusations and hints at having some dirt of his own to reveal:

“I can tell you, we’re fine. What we’re going to reveal, that will be the end of the Daily Kos,” Ali said. “I can say, it has to do with people owing money.”

Um… I love this.