Rasmussen Reports Surrenders

I used to like the polls from Rasmussen Reports. Through the 2008 election cycle, I thought their horse-race numbers were some of the best in the game, and I was willing to tolerate the presence of a bit of right-wing spin on their website. Very quickly after the '08 election, though, I became completely disenchanted with them, very quickly. I believe that the moment when I stopped ever routinely visiting their website was when they introduced this absurd "political class/mainstream America" concept. The idea was that they asked people three questions, which were supposed to identify something about, I dunno, populist versus elitism. The point was that a) those questions actually identified left-wing political opinions, roughly speaking, and b) they attached exceedingly biased labels to the two positions. So then they would use these things to demonstrate, of course, that the left-wing position on some issue was favored only by the "political class" while "mainstream America" had the conservative view. The second they started doing this stuff, I quit looking at their polls.

So I recently discovered that they did a poll on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and while of course they spin the poll as far away from this fact as they can, a plurality of voters (~43%) had a favorable opinion of OWS. What I wanted to see was how those numbers broke down by their political class/mainstream America divide, since you would really think that something calling itself "Occupy Wall Street," or "We Are the 99%," that carried out mass demonstrations against bankers and plutocrats and what-have-you was certainly on the populist side of the isle. I was hoping to find that their numbers showed that positive opinion of OWS was a feature of the political class, which would be a nice little talking point for me to use in demonstrating that their distinction is really just a left/right distinction, with a good label on the right and a bad label on the left. That wasn't what I found. Instead I found that they didn't break their numbers down using those labels. It appears very much like they've abandoned the concept of political class vs. mainstream America. It's about bloody time, whenever it happened.

Not that I'll go back to looking at Rasmussen polls, or anything, though...