You Can't Talk About IVR Polling Without Talking About Rasmussen

It's often a major error to analyze some shift in American politics, especially in the demographics thereof, without asking first whether it's really a nationwide phenomenon you're observing or just a really strong Southern phenomenon. For instance, I recently saw some numbers showing that essentially all of Obama's national deficit with white working-class voters comes from the South. Surprise! Southern whites, including the not-terribly-rich ones, don't like Barack Obama. Who'd've thought?

I think this study suggesting that IVR polls, commonly known as "robo-polls" where there's no live human interviewer, just prerecorded questions that one answers by pressing buttons, are "copying" live-interviewer polls to get better accuracy struggles from somewhat of a similar situation. Their evidence is that IVR polls have really lousy accuracy when they're conducted in a race that no standard-methodology pollster has yet touched, but once a race has seen a standard pollster check it out, IVR polling is just as accurate as live-interviewer thereafter. The people at PublicPolicyPolling, an intensely prolific and typically really accurate IVR polling firm, are naturally not thrilled with this. But I think the real problem with the survey is that, just as one errs by treating all of America, South and otherwise, as being one integral nation, one errs by treating all IVR pollsters alike.

Specifically, of course, I'm talking about Rasmussen Reports. Because here's the thing: we liberal polling junkies have been noticing for several years now that there's a distinctive pattern to Rasmussen's polling. Very early in a cycle, their polls look ridiculous. Specifically, they're ridiculously skewed toward the Republican candidates. Later in the cycle, if they continue to poll at all, their polls become much more sensible, and end up being quite accurate. What it looks like, given that it's pretty well-known that Rasmussen is a deeply partisan firm with a pretty substantial history of hackishness, is that early in cycles Rasmussen is engaged in polling-as-messaging, trying to create a buzz around Republican candidates that, perhaps, no one's ever given much heed to. That happened with Scott Brown, for instance. Then, since polling firms are basically only judged on the last batch of polls they release, later in the cycle Rasmussen starts using more sensible turnout models, etc., perhaps "copying" from the consensus of the polling to get good results and maintain their reputation, such as it is.

The result is that the largest chunk of robo-polling is conducted by a firm that is deliberately being inaccurate early in the cycle, when few of the traditional pollsters are yet at work, and deliberately making itself more accurate at crunch time, when most contests have already received a whole bunch o' polling. That would easily be enough to produce the kind of data that study found, I'm guessing, so I'd like to see the study run again excluding Rasmussen. I'd be pretty surprised if the result didn't change.

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...