Pollster kills site as critics pile on

The embattled polling company Research 2000, accused of fabricating polling information by Daily Kos proprietor Markos Moulitsas, has taken down its website and redirected users to a Wikipedia entry.

Del Ali, the president of Research 2000, said he removed the address because it was recently infiltrated by hackers, telling POLITICO in a one-line statement: “Hackers have polluted the site and we have taken it down.”

It has been one week since Daily Kos filed a seven-count lawsuit against its former pollster, alleging breach of contract, fraud and negligent representation. Moulitsas claims that at least a portion of Research 2000’s survey data, collected for Daily Kos over the past year and a half, was falsified, and he is seeking more than $100,000 in damages.


Moulitsas told POLITICO he could announce a new pollster for his site by next week and pledged that he would require a new survey company to release all its raw data along with its main results.

As the Daily Kos lawsuit proceeds, other Research 2000 critics are piling on too. Tom Jensen, who heads the North Carolina-based group Public Policy Polling, said in an interview that he wasn’t surprised by the blowup over his former competitor’s data.

“I have thought that Research 2000 was faking its polls for a very long time,” said Jensen, whose Democratic-leaning firm uses automated calls to collect polling information.

Jensen credited Moulitsas and a team of researchers for scrutinizing Research 2000’s results to unearth questionable, recurring problems.

“There were things in their polls, that if you were polling the same races, they just didn’t add up. Their crosstabs never moved. Republicans always got three, five or seven percent of the black vote,” he said. “And when they were polling a race, I think they’d just copy what else was out there. They’d just rip off each other people’s polls. I thought they weren’t legitimate for over a year.”

An attorney for Research 2000 did not immediately return a call for comment.

Democratic pollster John Anzalone said the entire episode highlighted the need for some kind of independent organization with bipartisan credibility to review polling results.

“Newspapers have ad watch reviews for campaign ads to check their truthfulness, but they seem to run any poll that is made public, even though they have no idea what type of sample they pulled, the quality of the phone bank or methodology, the sequencing of questions, the weighting,” he said. “There is a lot of junk polls out there, and apparently some polls are fabricated.”