Nate Silver: “In the course of our reporting on Trafalgar Group—part of the due diligence we often do while entering polls—we’ve learned that some of their polling was done for partisan clients that weren’t clearly disclosed. This doesn’t neatly fit into any of our current policies, although it goes against the transparency that we generally ask of pollsters. It’s important to know the sponsor/client for many reasons, including that our averages handle partisan/internal polls slightly differently. Therefore, in cases where a firm is doing a substantial amount of polling for partisan sponsors but has not been transparent about which polls are done for which clients, we’ll have to go ahead and label all of their polls as partisan. We’ve updated our policy to make this more explicit. But we’ll plan to revisit things after the election. We’ve been pretty relaxed in the past (i.e. not classifying polls as partisan when most others would) and we may need to get stricter.”