I was just going through the polling for Gubernatorial and Senatorial races to update my predictions, and looking at Rasmussen really worries me. In a lot of states, they are the odd man out in predicting Democratic victories. In fact, in most instances, his one-day polls are finding results that are distressingly conflicted with other polls, mostly in the Dem's favour.
While Rasmussen does have a history of slight Republican lean, I've never seen Scotty move around this much. This one-day polling is really bothering me and, despite good 2004 results, I'm having trouble trusting Rasmussen - a shame, since they are so prolific.
Any comments on this?
There is a reason (and a story) behind this.
In 2000 the Democrats did an incredibly good job in the voter turnout effort while there was NO nationally coordinated Republican turnout effort. The result was that in the popular vote Gore did significantly better than he would have done in a normal turnout election.
This messed up Scott's preduction (at that time Rasmussen was know as 'Portrait of America').
Well, Rasmussen changed his weighting to include more Democrats (particularly Black Democrats) and fewer Republicans than in his prior methodolgy.
Well, this din't work too badly in 2004 because Soros et al spent millions on turnout for the Democrats (but were countered by a Republican turnout effort, especially in key states like Iowa and Ohio).
This year, the Democrats do NOT have a party directed/funded turnout effort (they had a good one in 1998), Soros and Co. are not paying for such an effort this year, so a normal distribution seems likely (which means a higher Republican and lower Democrat turnout ratio than in 2004).
So, this explains why Scott's polls seem skewed in favor of the Democrats.
This is all bullocks, and Rasmussen ended up spot-on everywhere.
