Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I have explained to readers here with links to numbers guru Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com why the Rasmussen Reports poll has a "house effect" GOP bias, and is effectively a GOP "narrative" poll — a form of push polling.
The lazy political media continue to dutifully report the Rasmussen Reports "top line" poll numbers from press releases without ever questioning the scientifically flawed methodology of this outlier poll, or at least including an appropriate disclaimer that the poll numbers are no more accurate than the daily horoscope in the newspaper. It is for entertainment purposes only.
The Arizona Republic surprised me by exposing Rasmussen in an article on Sunday. Numbers man adding fuel to the political fire:
As cash-strapped newspapers and television networks struggle to meet the growing demand for polls, Rasmussen, 54, is supplying reams of cheap, automated surveys that will measure – and maybe move – opinion, especially as primary season gives way to the November midterm elections. A co-founder of the sports network ESPN and former play-by-play broadcaster, Rasmussen is an articulate and frequent guest on Fox News and other outlets, where his nominally non-partisan data is often cited to support Republican talking points. In October, he hired his own communications director to handle the daily press calls.
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Markos Moulitsas, the creator of the Daily Kos blog, has accused the pollster of "setting the narrative that Democrats are doomed" with numbers that fuel hours of Republican-boosting on talk radio and cable.
The old guard of the polling industry charges that Rasmussen merely makes educated guesses, like a market-savvy contestant on a political "The Price Is Right," and considers him a threat to the standards of an industry already facing existential challenges.
Those traditional peers fear Rasmussen's rise signals the fall of the in-depth probing that politicians, policymakers and reporters have turned to for more than half a century.
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In the mid-1990s, Rasmussen had discovered the business model of automated polling, and folks he polled heard a recording of his wife reading poll questions. In 1998, heavy traffic crashed his site when Rush Limbaugh unexpectedly told listeners to visit. Two years later, in August 2000, Bill O'Reilly invited him onto his show. He wrote columns for the conservative site WorldNetDaily in 2000. In 2001, he wrote a book advocating the privatization of Social Security.
His company kept growing, and in 2004 the Bush re-election campaign used a feature on his site that allowed customers to program their own polls. Rasmussen asserted that he never wrote any of the questions or assisted Republicans in any way, but by the 2008 presidential election his conservative bent was a kind of brand for him.
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"He has got a conservative constituency, he has Fox News and the Washington Times and Drudge," said John Zogby, the pollster whose publicity-seeking business model is considered a forebear of Rasmussen's. "The conservative result is the one that is going to get a huge level of coverage."
So the news media is selling us GOP-biased propaganda as "news reporting" of inaccurate poll numbers because the media will not spend money for a credible poll. Stephen Colbert labeled this "truthiness": a "truth" a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts – and in this case, scientifically proven methodology.
Sadly, Rasmussen's bogus "narrative" polling is being duplicated by others who want into the game.
This week the Arizona Guardian (subscription required) launches its first weekly political campaign tracking poll. The AzGuardian polls are being conducted using the same "scientific" (sic) methodology as national pollsters with a statewide random sample size of 1,000 voters.
Data is collected using automated polling technology by Political Calling Inc. This is the same methodology used by recognized polling companies including Rasmussen Polls, Inc. … [subscriber article]
Just stop! Stop reporting scientifically flawed polls because you have column space to fill, and lazy political reporters, who like Scott Rasmussen, prefer talking about the "horse race" poll numbers (with inaccurate numbers) rather than doing substantive reporting on the candidates and the issues.
UPDATE: Are you kidding me? GOP narrative pollster Rasmussen is now polling the Democratic U.S. Senate primary in Arizona and the Political Notebook at the Arizona Daily Star actually reports the "top line" poll results? Political Briefs Worse, Jim Nintzel, who has written about Rasmussen's lack of credibility as much as I have, nevertheless reports the Rasmussen poll. Democratic Primary for U.S. Senate: Wide Open Race "Horse race" poll numbers, even those that are made up numbers, are like crack to the media. It is an addiction the media just can't quit.