Folks,

I felt the need to share a short memo with you now on the state of the public polling industry. I am thinking of writing a larger memo, but this will have to suffice for now.

Without a doubt, we've made some pretty impressive gains in our goal to improve the public polling industry. Our calls for greater transparency, more reliable accuracy and a higher standard of ethics have encouraged other pollsters to join our cause.

Jim Lee at Susquehanna—now deservedly the pollster for The Federalist—has been a warrior for that cause.

While I'd very much like to see more in the industry join us, I am realistic and indeed fully expect more will do just that in good time.

Our words have shamed decades-old media and university pollsters into changing their methodology, and even the vendors with whom they work. The latter even contacted the very companies we suggested they build relationships with. Repeat offenders and outliers are now reported with caveats, not as Gospel.

But unfortunately, there is still a lot of disappointing behavior and ethnical shortfalls.

This cycle, we have witnessed congressional candidates conduct push polling and bio testing while passing it off to local news outlets as legitimate internal campaign polling. These outlets have published this garbage without performing even the most basic vetting.

This seems to be especially prevalent in California. In Texas, we saw some of the worst example of "client pleasing" with Paradigm Strategies on behalf of Allen West. Remington Research did the same in Ohio after publishing a fake poll to boost a donor candidate in California.

Though I have a reputation of not tolerating bad practices or deception, I've still been asked to obscure pollster identity during fieldwork and even omit sponsorship of polling. Regardless of the person or entity, I will never do either. Obscuring pollster identity is a clear violation of 10DLC and failing to report sponsorship is not only a violation of basic standards of disclosure but a gross violation of ethics.

Again, I think I should elaborate on this, perhaps name names in an op-ed for Rasmussen Reports. But for now, I'll say this: though I'm pleased with the gains we've made together, we have a lot more work to do. We started the People's Pundit Locals Community to start a revolution in Data Journalism, and we cannot afford to lose it.