All of us work in fields pertaining to analytics. We've put together and processed files, cut universes, run counts, sampled and oversampled, designed experiments, conducted experiments, interpreted data and then criticised other people's projects. Collectively, we have decades of experience in this area. As such, we are drawing on our experience, judgement and restricted knowledge that we have access to. None of us will reveal confidential data pertaining to our clients. That would be a horrific breach of professional ethics, and any instance thereof will result in immediate banning from the site, deletion of all materials and an apology to the client in question. The only exception to this rule is that we reserve the right to speak about confidential materials that have already been leaked to the media, activists and bloggers. For example, if McCain reveals his latest internal polling numbers from Public Opinion Strategies in an email to supporters, we have no problem with discussing those numbers. If Rick Noriega's staff can anonymously discuss his methods or strategy with the media on background, we have no problems discussing them on this site.

In short, we will respect the confidentiality of such data to the degree that the clients themselves do. If they're making this information available to insiders, we see no reason not to spread it to outsiders.

So what kind of insider knowledge will we discuss? It's not the stuff of which films are made. One data vendor claims that they have accurate phone coverage, but they don't. A 527 cooked the numbers on their latest press release. A state party is going to commission a poll to score their voter file – who's going to get the contract? Is this a good or a bad thing? What kinds of tools are coming down the pipeline? Is an online services vendor actually creating any deliverables, or is it all smoke and mirrors?

None of this is the glamourous stuff of politics, but it's the nuts and bolts of what happens. You cannot get from considering a candidacy to declaring victory without it.