Last Call

Well whaddya know.  Looks like the Powers That Be have decided that Rasmussen's constantly outlying poll numbers are now A Story Of Some Measure.  Oh, but this is Politico, you see...so the story is "How the mean Democrats pick on Scott Rasmussen's polling firm."

“I don’t think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does,” said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, a progressive research center. “His data looks like it all comes out of the RNC [Republican National Committee].”

“Whether intended or not, Rasmussen polls have been used by conservative voices as talking points, and when that happens on one side it inevitably produces a reaction from the other,” explained Mark Blumenthal, a polling analyst and the editor and publisher of Pollster.com. “Rasmussen produces a lot of data that appear to produce narratives conservatives are promoting, and that causes a reaction.”

Now I've been complaining about Rasmussen's polls for months now.  It's not just his oddball "likely voter" samples, either...that skews the respondents heavily towards older white voters who have voted before and heavily under-samples minority and young voters.  Scott Rasmussen himself freely admits this.   Rasmussen's questions are heavily suggestive too.

(More after the jump...)

In August, for example, Rasmussen asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”

“Why stop there, Rasmussen? Why not add a parenthetical phrase about how tax cuts regrow hair, whiten teeth, and ensure that your favorite team will win the Super Bowl this year?” responded Daily Kos blogger Steve Singiser, who frequently writes about polls.

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman believes Rasmussen designs its polling questions to elicit negative responses about Obama and Democrats — a sentiment that is widely shared in the liberal blogosphere.

“I think they write their questions in a way that supports a conservative interpretation of the world,” said Mellman. “In general, they tend to be among the worst polls for Democrats, and they phrase questions in ways that elicit less support for the Democratic point of view.”

Democratic politicians seem equally leery of Rasmussen polling: At a news conference just prior to the 2008 election, when asked about a poll showing GOP Sen. John Sununu moving ahead of eventual Democratic winner Jeanne Shaheen, then-Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer had a ready answer.

“Yeah, that was a Rasmussen poll,” said a dismissive Schumer

In an interview, Rasmussen adamantly denied that he is framing his polling to appeal to a conservative audience, saying: “We certainly don’t see it that way.”

“It’s the adage that if you don’t like the message, shoot the messenger,” he added.

Only one problem, Scott:  the messenger in this case controls the message.  He also control who qualifies as a likely voter.  Rasmussen expanded what their polls considered a "likely voter" towards the end of 2008 to more closely reflect the reality of the public. And therein lies the problem.  Now he's gone back to the old models of "likely voters" and naturally, the Wingers are riding to Scott Rasmussen's defense.  He's not the outlier, you see...it's the entire rest of the political polling industry, and only Rasmussen tells the truth!

Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com explains both of these reasons in pretty powerful detail and adds a third probable cause of Rasmussen's wonky numbers:  it's an automated phone poll.

Much of the speculation about the differences involving Rasmussen and other automated pollsters centers on the automated mode itself (often referred to by the acronym IVR, for interactive voice response). Tom Jensen of PPP, a firm that also interviews with an automated method, offered one such theory earlier this year:

[P]eople are just more willing to say they don't like a politician to us than they are to a live interviewer because they don't feel any social pressure to be nice. That's resulted in us, Rasmussen, and Survey USA showing poorer approval numbers than most for a variety of politicians.

Other commentators offer a different theory, neatly summarized recently by John Sides, who speculates that since automated polls "generate lower response rates" than those using live interviewers, automated poll samples may "[skew] towards the kind of politically engaged citizens who are more likely to think and act as partisan[s] or ideologues," even after weighting to correct demographic imbalances.

The combination of all three factors is what regularly skews Rasmussen polls against the President...and those numbers come out basically five days a week.

Then again, as Nate Silver notes, Zogby polls are even worse for Dems.

But note here that Rasmussen isn't claiming its polls are the most accurate:  only that it uses a different methodology (or in this case a combination of methodologies in likely voters and automated phone polls) plus the questions they use.  Scott Rasmussen doesn't deny the spin he's putting out at all.

I still stand by my statement that Rasmussen is the easiest way to measure Obama Derangement Syndrome.