Quick thread. Warning: not super exciting.
1. In the course of our reporting on Trafalgar Group—part of the due diligence we often do while entering polls—we've learned that some of their polling was done for partisan clients that weren't clearly disclosed.
1. In the course of our reporting on Trafalgar Group—part of the due diligence we often do while entering polls—we've learned that some of their polling was done for partisan clients that weren't clearly disclosed.
2. This doesn't neatly fit into any of our current policies, although it goes against the transparency that we generally ask of pollsters.
3. It's important to know the sponsor/client for many reasons, including that our averages handle partisan/internal polls slightly differently: fivethirtyeight.com/features/our-n…
4. Therefore, in cases where a firm is doing a substantial amount of polling for partisan sponsors but has not been transparent about which polls are done for which clients, we'll have to go ahead and label all of their polls as partisan.
5. We’ve updated our policy to make this more explicit. But we’ll plan to revisit things after the election. We’ve been pretty relaxed in the past (i.e. not classifying polls as partisan when most others would) and we may need to get stricter. fivethirtyeight.com/features/polls…
6. We're also having to be a bit expedient here because it's four days to the election. There are some further threads—some related to Trafalgar but mostly on more general themes—that we'd like to have time to more fully think thru and report out.
7. But to repeat: what we know now is a handful of Trafalgar polls were released without any initial indication of a partisan sponsor, when there had been one.
8. One of these cases came to our attention in a (friendly) conversation with Robert Cahaly, Trafalgar's CEO. They have been helpful with some things and we know they're very busy right now, so we appreciate their time.
9. Having resolved this, we've also added a backlog of Trafalgar polls that were conducted over the past few days to our averages.
10. Adding those (and marking past Trafalgar polls as R partisan) turned out to make no difference. Biden’s chances were 89 percent before and 89 percent afterward, while Democrats’ Senate chances were essentially unchanged (77.5 percent vs 77.1). Have a good Friday night, all.
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