Markos Moulitsas, who first fired his former polling partner Research 2000 in June and subsequently filed suit alleging that polling conducted by that firm was fraudulent, announced this afternoon that his DailyKos website will soon resume polling with two new partners: Public Policy Polling (PPP) for "horserace" polling in statewide contests and another pollster to be named later for national surveys. The first survey, to be fielded in Delware, will be released next week.
Moulitsas was also quick to tweet what will amount to a new standard in polling disclosure:
And while we won't be able to do it next week, both pollsters have agreed to RELEASE ALL RAW DATA. We just have to figure out the logistics.
Access to raw data will mean that anyone with basic statistical software will be able to use the data to run their own tabulations or analysis. While many national media pollsters provide such raw data to academic archives like the Roper Center for Public Opinion and the Pew Research Center provides it on their website, those resources are usually available many months after the results are released.
Tom Jensen, PPP's polling director, provided this reaction for The Huffington Post:
We're very excited for the opportunity, especially because Daily Kos has shown such a strong interest in surveying 'under polled' races over the years. We're looking forward to getting data out there in states like Delaware, where we're kicking off, that don't usually see a lot of public polling. We're also glad in a time when a few bad apples have cast a shade over the polling industry to let people see that we're really doing our work. We really appreciate Markos' commitment to transparency and are happy to partner with him on that
UPDATE:
Markos posts more details to Daily Kos, including news that they "hope to be back up to pre-scandal polling frequencies by September" as well as this comment:
I'm so excited about all of this I can barely contain myself. While the R2K mess has been a nightmare, it has opened up new possibilities -- the ability to work with some of the most accomplished pollsters in the biz, and break new ground by providing unparalleled transparency.
His post also notes that PPP was one of only two pollsters from a short list of those he considers most accurate that was available to do "horserace" polling. He explains that automated pollster SurveyUSA "couldn't do horserace polling because of exclusivity contracts with other media organizations." Could that be a clue to the identity of the yet-to-be announced pollster that will conduct non-horserace "weekly State of the Nation national polling" for DailyKos?"