Rasmussen: The Politico Of Polling?
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Anyone else get the sense that the constant, always pro-Republican polling from Rasmussen is the pollster equivalent of the sort of non-story Drudge linkbait from Politico? Because I do.
18 Responses to “Rasmussen: The Politico Of Polling?”
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The views on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the views of my employer, Media Matters for America
© 2000-2011 Oliver Willis
Cosigned with enthusiasm. Any time Rasmussen has to come up with a totally new way to read their polls just so they can make it look worse for President Obama you know its time to simply disregard him altogether.
Scott Rasmussen gets almost as much face time on Fox as billo and Hannity. He wants to keep the gravytrain rolling
This kind of explains it. Comparing likely voters vs. population.
The numbers aren’t actually as important as the trend is, such as comparing a March Rasmussen vs an Apr Rasmussen. Or doing the same with an NPR poll.
Even if you don’t agree with their representative population, any bias should be constant from poll to poll.
I’d check their results against others in a composite format, such as:
http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Approval.htm
fred, you can check their results for 2008 here. They predicted Obama +6 (actual results Obama+7)
The only other polling outfit doing daily polls (Gallup) had Obama +11. Gallup currently has Obama at 55%. Take out the 4-5 Democratic bias inherent in Gallup and the numbers more or less confirm what Rassmussen is showing.
If Rassmussen is consistently delivering “pro-Republian polling”, then the reason must be because the country is slowly turning Republican. Keep insulting average, ordinary Americans with the “thug and Nazi” talk. Because it worked so well in 1994…
Rasmussen is generally accurate, but only the final days of a campaign. Mid-cycle, they were a consistent, pro-Republican outlier. Then, in the last few days, they turn on the real numbers and fall back into line – and people rave about how accurate they are.
In the Presidential election, the use of their “likely voter” model (and a quite rigid model, at that), under-estimated Obama’s support significantly. This was because the HRC and Obama campaigns had registered millions of people who had never voted before, and were thus not considered “likely” voters.
Even now, Rasmussen’s likely voter model does not consider these new voters as “likely voters” – though they voted in the 2008 election – because they have never voted in a mid-term.
On top of that, Rasmussen refuses to include cell phones in their sampling – though Gallup does. A lot of people do not have a “landline” and use their cell phone as their primary phone.
Further, by breaking up their random calling into equal numbers from each area code, Rasmussen over-samples rural areas, which favours Republicans.
If “voter intensity” is so important to Rasmussen, one can only wonder why it was not important during the 2000 and 2004 elections. Both were “base elections”, which is what Rasmussen says 2010 will be, and which is the justification for his new “strong” A/D methodology.
The usual good sense from Nate Silver on this issue
Nate is too diplomatic to say it but I’m not: Rasmussen’s Likely Voter pool needs to have the green scum sucked off its bottom.
SaveFarris is here to make Dennis look smart.
The Republicans are extremely unliklely to regain Congress or the White House for at least a dozen years, but I tend to be pessimistic.
As was pointed out above, Rasmussen’s polls are OK in the last few days of the election because of the likely voter screen. However, the approval and issue polling is consistently bullshit. It’s not a surprise Rasmussen always had Bush 3 to 5 points above the rest of the polling orgs and now Obama is always 3 to 5 points below the other polling orgs in his polling.
I stopped paying attention to their polls.
I wonder which polling outfir would be considered an accurate Oracle of our fair republic?
I wonder which polling outfir would be considered an accurate Oracle of our fair republic?
None: all polls are fallible creations of fallible humans. All must be viewed with a healthy skepticism.
lol,
Then why single one out for denunciation?
I wonder which polling outfir would be considered an accurate Oracle of our fair republic?
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/
Interesting site Indeed,
It seems worth bookmarking and seeing how it looks over time. Interesting to point out that 538 does not share Ollie’s feelings towards Rasmussen, which probably is as it should be since Willis is a rabid partisan and propagandista by day. 538 ranks Rasmussen as 3rd in accuracy, well above the average.
Rasmussen has been spot-on in indicating Obama’s falling poll numbers in nearly every category.
To wit:
USAToday/Gallup Poll:Less faith in Obama’s economic abilities
————–
Qualms about President Obama’s stewardship of the economy are growing, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, as Americans become more pessimistic about when they predict the recession will end.
At six months in office, Obama’s 55% approval rating puts him 10th among the 12 post-World War II presidents at this point in their tenures. When he took office, he ranked seventh.…………
……• By 49%-47%, those surveyed disapprove of how he is handling the economy, a turnaround from his 55%-42% approval in May. The steepest drop came from conservative and moderate Democrats.
• By 50%-44%, they disapprove of how he is handling health care policy.
• A 59% majority say his proposals call for too much government spending and 52% say they call for too much expansion of government power.
• Expectations of the economy’s turnaround are souring a bit. In February, the average prediction for a recovery was 4.1 years; now it’s 5.5 years.
• The administration’s stimulus package isn’t seen as a benefit by most whether viewed in the short term or the long term, in how it will impact the country or individuals. Only a third think it will help their own family’s finances in the long run.
——————-
Another one Rasmussen’s results called:
In Virginia, ‘Thanks but No Thanks, Mr. President’?
WaPo:Creigh Deeds’s Presidential Dilemma
Two-thirds of Virginia voters said that President Obama’s support of Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) either makes no difference or makes them less likely to back the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, according to a new Washington Post survey….
..Most interestingly, however, was that just 23 percent of Independents said the support of Obama increased their likelihood of voting for Deeds while 37 percent said it made them less likely to support the Democratic nominee. Nearly four in ten (38 percent) said Obama’s endorsement made no difference in their vote.
As we have written in this space many times, independents formed the backbone of not only Obama’s winning coalition in 2008 — particularly in previously Republican leaning states like Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia — but also of Democratic gains in the House and Senate last November and in 2006.
These numbers suggest that Obama’s hold on independents has faded since last November in Virginia — the inevitable result when campaign promises and governing reality clash.
Seems to be alot of arguing over something that is pretty clear if you look at the data fairly consistently. Rasumussen has a fairly consistent house lean toward republicans and republican viewpoints. Sure, the statistics (which are just one snapshot from the one time when we can do verification – elections) many times show then as accurate, but they are an outlier a vast majority of the time. They are also one of the only pollsters that uses the robo-call method and they are slow to update their likely voter model.
Just look at the data – this has nothing to do with “insulting ordinary Americans” or calling people “Nazis” as some people have erroneously suggested on here. Time to calm down and think with the data, not your personal wishes.