Hello everyone. My name is Chris Bowers, and I am the lead blogger for My Due Diligence, www.mydd.com. When Mark first asked me if I would like to participate in a conference of professional pollsters, I was very excited even though I knew there was a possibility that I would be persona non grata at such a conference. After all, the first time I really made national news as a blogger was when I questioned the validity of the samples and methodologies of several well-established polling firms, especially Gallup. Further, I did this despite being anything but an established professional in the field of polling. While I am not fully aware of the educational and professional backgrounds of the two bloggers who worked with me in this endeavor, Steve Soto of the Left Coaster and Ruy Teixeira of Donkey Rising, I myself only have six college credits of math and political science to my name, and I took those courses more than ten years ago.

Considering both my lack of professional expertise (a common trend among bloggers), and the circumstances under which polling first collided with blogging in the national news, it would not surprise me if many people attending the conference think of bloggers as both ignorant of and adversarial toward polling firms. However, I would like to use this short speech to make it clear that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, without any doubt in my mind, I can say that political bloggers are by far the biggest fans of political polling in America today. We are absolutely obsessed with you and what you do. Many of us subscribe to all of your websites. We read your press releases with relish, and write for audiences that are filled with hard-core consumers and devotees of your work. In Malcolm Gladwell's terminology, political bloggers and the many people who visit and participate in political blogs are public opinion mavens who can almost never consume too much information about the daily fluctuations of the national political landscape.

While bloggers are not adversarial toward polling firms, the same cannot be said about our attitude toward established news organizations. Indeed, the political blogging phenomenon has in large part grown out of disgust with established news organizations such as CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and ABC. Political blogging, and especially political election blogging, can be understood at least partially as a direct reaction to what many people feel is a continuing decline in the quantity of detailed, useful, and regularly updated information on politics from established sources of news. I myself first discovered political blogging in September 2002 after becoming frustrated with what I felt was the stunning lack of information on the midterm elections that was being provided by established news outlets. It took me about two hours on Google to finally discover two free websites, Dailykos and MyDD, that were dedicated to providing detailed information on the upcoming elections. However, once I found these websites, I never again went back to regular use of so-called "mainstream" sources of news for political information.

When I discovered Daily Kos and MyDD, I was introduced to an entire underground universe of people dedicated to collecting and distributing the latest information on politics and election, of which those two websites were just the tip of the iceberg. I am the sort of political junkie who, during the 2000 presidential election, produced a daily average of state-by-state and national polls for my own use. I thought I was pretty much the only person who did that, but on election-oriented political blogs, I met what seemed like hundreds, and even thousands, of other people who had done exactly the same thing. At that time, these bloggers were working collectively to try accomplish what established news organizations had seemingly stopped trying to do: gather all of the latest news and polling information for the upcoming midterm elections in order to try and better understand them. It was a truly revelatory discovery for me. Here were numerous small websites operated almost entirely by political amateurs that distributed more news and polling information on the 2002 elections than hundred million dollar news operations.

As time has gone on, and major news outlets have continued to decrease the amount of time they spend covering national politics and campaigns, the audience of the political blogosphere has grown dramatically. From perhaps one or two hundred thousand in late 2002, now over two million people every day visit political blogs such as MyDD. Also as time has gone on, the political blogosphere has grown tremendously in its knowledge of how polling works. From more or less simply accepting top-sheet results of surveys at face value three years ago, we have now become engaged in a variety of debates that, from my understanding, have been taking place within the professional world of public opinion research for some time. For example, during the 2004 election, we vigorously debated the merits of weighting surveys according to partisan self-identification. Also during the election, we discussed the merits of different likely voter turnout models, as well as when it was more appropriate to use a registered voter model than a likely voter model. More recently, discussions of question wording have taken prominence. There have also been long running debates over the validity of automated and internet polling, as well as detailed and original research on the so-called "incumbent rule." Of course, there has also been nearly endless research and discussion of exit polls, including the ethics of releasing them before precincts actually close.

My point in all of this is that the political blogosphere is both a rapidly emerging market for public opinion surveys, and a useful counterweight to what many of us feel is the increasingly thin and un-nuanced discussion of polling information that takes place within established media outlets. I will not go into the gory details of the problems with the way polls are presented by many print and television outlets, since I am sure many of you in the audience are quite familiar with that situation. Instead, I simply wish to say that when political bloggers raise questions about the results of certain polls, they do so not in an attempt to discredit those polls, but instead as part of our ongoing project to try and better understand that state of public opinion. This is an understanding we try to pass on to our audiences, and which we hope will have an impact on the larger media narrative as it relates to public opinion on any given issue.

The only thing we ask of you is greater transparency. Nothing is more frustrating than researching and discussing public opinion when the knowledge needed to continue the discussions or research is simply not available. All too often, when those of us who are interested look for internal information from contentious polls, it either takes us hours to find it or it simply is not available. Considering the influence that we all know polls wield over national politics, many bloggers have repeatedly called for polling firms to release all of the internal information from each poll to the public in an easily accessible, online format. Doing so would go a long way toward allowing the audience that is most interested and concerned with polling in this country--the two million people or so who visit political blogs every day--to draw more informed and nuanced conclusions about the state of public opinion. We are absolutely obsessed with what you do, and we are just trying to understand it better.

Thank you for your time, and thank you for hosting this panel. I have posted a copy of this speech on my blog, www.MyDD.com. Please stop by and make a comment.