Category: Daily Kos

A. +/- Umpteen Eleventy

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Q. What was the statistical margin of error on DailyKos polls for the past two years?

Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos has sued his polling company, Research 2000 (R2K, for short), alleging that the firm supplied “fraudulent” data. Daily Kos has produced a report that seems to indicate R2K was just making up numbers. I say “seems to indicate,” because:

  • I’m a journalist, not a statistician; and
  • This is a pending lawsuit, so we don’t want to convict someone prematurely.

With that in mind, however . . . .

BWAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHA! ROTFLMAO!

DKos (allegedly) got hosed by this polling company, which was (apparently) selling him live phone polls — i.e., not automated “robo-calls” — at suspiciously low prices. And it seems that neither Markos nor his genius readers suspected anything was amiss until statistics wizard Nate Silver analyzed recent polls and discovered that R2K ranked dead last in accuracy among major polling firms.

Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini roughed in some numbers and found something else fishy:

R2K did polling for state-level liberal blogs like Blue Mass Group in the run up to the Massachusetts special election. On January 14, R2K produced a poll showing Coakley with an 8-point lead (while other polls were showing Brown pulling ahead), and in touting the “good” news, Blue Mass Group proudly noted that “Research 2000 does live interviews, unlike robo-pollsters Rasmussen and PPP.”  . . .
Did a Massachusetts progressive blog pay more than $6,000 for a top-of-the-line survey when maybe a half dozen other pollsters were polling the race by that point? Really? This begs the question of what Blue Mass Group really paid. And what did Kos really pay?

Exactly. If it seems to good to be true, it usually is and yet it seems R2K was able to find willing clients for its dubious services among liberal bloggers.

Yeah.

Which calls to mind the fact that major “progressive” organizations were among the victims hardest hit when Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme finally collapsed.

The moral of the story is, if you’re running a rip-off operation, seek clients who believe in Keynesian economics, anthropogenic global warming, peace through disarmament, Hope and Change and unicorns.  We leave you with this cogent economic analysis from a leading progressive intellectual, Peggy Joseph:

Democrats: Because Stupid People Have Rights, Too!

They Deserve Each Other: Olbermann and Daily Kos Break Up to Make Up?

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There have been more than a few outbreaks of raw crazy on the blogosphere lately, and it’s reassuring to see that the same virus has infested the brackish waters at Daily Kos, where Keith Olbermann asks, “Et tu, Kossacks?”

I used to read a lot about how people here would ‘always have my back’ and trust me this was of palpable value . . .

Read the rest from Dan Riehl, who spares you the necessity of having to click through to the Kososphere. There’s now a Memeorandum thread, with Reason magazine, Jammie Wearing Fool, Weasel Zippers and Don Surber getting into the gloat zone.

When the crazy-virus starts going around, it helps to remember this: It takes two to make a folie à deux.

Kos Spins Mass. Senate Campaign: ‘Teabaggers’ Doom Scott Brown?

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Jumping in Pools gives this spin a thorough fisking, but here’s just a taste of Kos in whistle-past-the-graveyard mode:

Brown has been caught in a vice. His support from teabaggers was critical to becoming competitive . . .
On the other hand, that conservative support has come at a cost. . . . The teabaggers demand ideological purity, and he’s had to deliver. . . .

That interpretation is nonsense, of course. I hashed this out yesterday: It’s Massachusetts, and Brown’s conservative supporters understand that. Nobody expects Scott Brown to vote like Jim DeMint or Tom Coburn.

Acceptance of the Kos spin requires a false perception of “teabaggers” and other conservatives as rigid, irrational, ill-informed fanatics. It also requires a severe misunderestimation of how broad-based the anti-Obama backlash really is, as Ed Morrissey says: “Democrats in Massachusetts appear demoralized, independents are fleeing, and it’s the GOP that has the energy at the moment.”

At least none of those dangerous “teabaggers” have started shoving around reporters, eh, Kos?