Old news. Since then, his polling has been way off and he's been criticized for modeling and for very poor question construction. Really weird stuff. In fact, in 2010 he had the WORST record of all major pollsters and missed one race by a whopping 40 points !
From Wikipedia:
Criticism
[edit] Nate Silver
In 2010,
Nate Silver of the
New York Times blog
FiveThirtyEight wrote the article Is Rasmussen Reports biased?, in which he mostly defended Rasmussen from allegations of bias.
[22]. However, by later in the year, Rasmussen's polling results diverged notably from other mainstream pollsters, which Silver labeled a 'house effect.'
[23] He went on to explore other factors which may have explained the effect such as the use of a likely voter model,
[24] and claimed that Rasmussen conducted its polls in a way that excluded the majority of the population from answering.
[25] Silver also criticized Rasmussen for often only polling races months before the election, which prevented them from having polls just before the election which could be assessed for accuracy. In response, he wrote that he was looking appropriate ways to punish pollsters like Rasmussen in his pollster rating models who dont poll in the final days before an election.
[26]
After Election night that year, Silver concluded that Rasmussen's polls were the least accurate of the major pollsters in 2010, having an average error of 5.8 points and a pro-Republican bias of 3.9 points according to Silver's model.
[27] He singled out as an example the Hawaii Senate Race, which Rasmussen showed
the incumbent 13 points ahead, where he in actuality
won by 53[28] - a difference of 40 points, or "the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEights database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998."
[27]
[edit] Other
TIME has described Rasmussen Reports as a "conservative-leaning polling group".
[29] According to Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who co-developed Pollster.com,
[30] He [Rasmussen] polls less favorably for Democrats, and thats why hes become a lightning rod." Franklin also said: "Its clear that his results are typically more Republican than the other persons results.
[31]
The
Center For Public Integrity has claimed that Scott Rasmussen was a
paid consultant for the 2004
George W. Bush campaign.
[32] The Washington Post reported "... the Bush reelection 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..." The do-it-yourself polling service is used by Democrats as well as Republicans today through a company that licenses Rasmussens methodology.
Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls.
[33][34] Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll;
[35] the commentators in question allege that the questions Rasmussen ask in polls are skewed in order to favor a specific response. For instance, when Rasmussen polled whether Republican voters thought Rush Limbaugh was the leader of their party, the specific question they asked was: "Agree or Disagree: 'Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party -- he says jump and they say how high.'"
[34]
