Rasmussen Claims ABC News Threatening to Ban Pollster From FiveThirtyEight Unless It Can Explain Political Ties And Methodology

Rasmussen Reports insisted this week that a senior ABC News editor sent the pollster a letter demanding the right-of-center organization answer a series of questions regarding its political ties and methodology or face a ban on FiveThirtyEight — the popular political news and forecasting website.

Rasmussen ran the letter on its website on Thursday under the title, “ABC News: ‘Answer Our Questions — Or Else!’” The letter, according to Rasmussen, read:

My name is Elliott Morris, and I am the Editorial Director of Data Analytics at ABC News. I am responsible for our editorial analysis of polls, elections results and other data, including the output at ABC’s FiveThirtyEight.

I am emailing you to send a final notice that FiveThirtyEight is considering formally banning Rasmussen Reports from its coverage. Such a ban would result in being removed from listing on our main polls page and being excluded from all of our aggregation and election forecasting models. If banned, Rasmussen Reports would also be removed from our historical averages of polls and from our pollster ratings. Your surveys would no longer appear in reporting and we would write an article explaining our reasons for the ban.

“First, Rasmussen must explain the nature of its relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm. please tell us whether questions are ever suggested to Rasmussen from these outlets, including Fox News and “Steve Bannon’s War Room“, where Rasmussen’s head pollster regularly appears, with the promise of coverage in return for “public” fieldwork?” adds the letter, insinuating Rasmussen is engaged with a quid-pro-quo with right-wing media.

Rasmussen’s lead pollster, Mark Mitchell, called into Bannon’s show on Friday to discuss the letter.

The request for more information from Morris, who works for FiveThirtyEight’s parent company ABC, included the following questions:

1. This survey seems to indicate that Rasmussen’s weighting targets or sampling strategies are not well-tuned, since the outcome of the poll does not match the observable election result. How are you addressing that methodological problem?
2. This tweet seems to indicate that Rasmussen’s IVR polling is reaching the same people (or, at least, person) multiple times. Is the phone portion of the poll relying on a panel of some type? If not, why would the same citizen get routine calls from the same pollster?
3. Perhaps related to #2: Your methodology states, “Calls are placed to randomly-selected phone numbers through a process that ensures appropriate geographic representation.” What is the process being applied? And what does “randomly-selected” mean here? If not RDD, where are you getting your call lists?
4. The methodology mentions a “demographically diverse panel” for online respondents. Is this panel proprietary, or are you contracting it out? If the former, how do you recruit and ensure balanced representation on the panel? If the latter, to whom are you contracting out?
5. The methodology mentions you weight by “age, race, gender, political party, and other factors.” What are the other factors?
6. The methodology also states, “For political surveys, census bureau data provides a starting point and a series of screening questions are used to determine likely voters. The questions involve voting history, interest in the current campaign, and likely voting intentions.” Does this mean you are weighting first and screening second? If so, is there additional rebalancing for the LV sample? For example, women are less likely than men to say they’re definitely going to vote, but they usually make up at least half of the electorate anyway.

The letter included some additional questions regarding methodology and noted that the company has until the end of the month to answer them or be removed from the site. Morris addressed a recent Washington Examiner story on the letter and declared “dealing with rasmussen is long overdue.” Morris slammed the Examiner story as “not accurate” and noted that additional information is coming soon.

Nate Silver, who founded FiveThirtyEight but whose contract was recently not continued by ABC, replied on Twitter to the letter. “Very bad to do a Spanish Inquisition with pollsters based on their political orientation. I love my ex-colleagues (this is coming from a new guy they hired) but if this is their practice, hope ABC will stop use of 538 brand so it isn’t associated with me,” Silver wrote with a screenshot of the letter.

Rasmussen is unique among pollsters as its online presence is very overtly political and at times even engages in trolling via the pollster’s official Twitter account. Morris recently highlighted some of the behavior on his Twitter feed.

Read the full letter here.