What Is Going On With The Rasmussen Reports Polls?

For many of us political junkies, we like to follow the political opinion polls to gauge the mood of the country.   Two of the polls that I check regularly are the Rasmussen Reports polls and the Gallup opinion polls because both of those are updated daily. 

In the past, the Rasmussen Reports poll [I think unfairly] was perceived by most on the left to be skewed to favor Republicans.  In 2010 Nate Silver did an analysis of the different polling firms and in his opinion he found the Rasmussen Reports [headed by Scott Rasmussen] to be biased [skewed toward Republicans] and inaccurate.  I must admit, being a conservative Republican, I did go to the Rasmussen Reports web site first because it did seem like out of all the polls, their results would be more favorable to Republicans.  I just assumed, maybe out of hope, that they were the most accurate.  That seemed true up until these last couple of months after Mr. Rasmussen decided to leave his post as head of the Rasmussen Reports web site.

In July 2013, Scott Rasmussen left his post to found
Rasmussen Media Group, LLC, a digital media firm whose stated mission is
to “refine, enlarge, and empower the voice of mainstream America.”

Rasmussen Reports say they have kept the same methodology since Scott left in order to preserve the legacy of the web site, but the results of their polls these last few weeks seemed to suggest something different.  While in the past if the Rasmussen polls were an outlier, they were almost always an outlier favored more to the Republican side compared to the other polls [for the most part-of course, not every time].   But if you have checked the Rasmussen Reports polls these last few weeks compared to the other opinion polls, and to the average of all the polls as noted in Real Clear Politics, they have been an outlier, but this time they have been an outlier favoring the president.    It would be one thing if their polls just showed a rise in the president’s popularity that went along with all of the other polls, but that is not the case.  They have had president Obama’s favorability rating at 50 and 51% many times these last few weeks, when no other polls have had him that high.  Their recent polls have been an outlier, favorable to the president by between 5-7% of the Real Clear Politics average of polls.  For example, as I am writing this post on Sunday, check out this average of polls from Real Clear Politics:

As you see in the average of all the polls, the president has a 43.7%  approval rating with a negative 7.5% spread [i.e., approval vs disapproval].    But the Rasmussen Reports poll showed the president with a 50% approval rating and a tie in the spread.  That is a big outlier in favor of the president and it has been like this for weeks now.

I am not accusing the Rasmussen Reports of being taken over by some liberal Democrats trying to skew the results in favor of the president, but I am really curious as to why, since Scott Rasmussen has left the Rasmussen Reports, the polls seem to have been an outlier in favor of the president, when in the past, if  they were an outlier, they were an outlier that seemed to disfavor the president.

Maybe, it is possible, that this is just a coincidence, but it still seems like a curious coincidence to me.  I wish someone with a lot more expertise in polls and methodology than me, like Nate Silver or someone like him, would do a comparative analysis of the Rasmussen Reports between the time of Scott Rasmussen’s tenure to the time he has left the Rasmussen Reports.

Hmm, now that the Rasmussen Reports polls seem more favorable to the president, I wonder if Nate Silver would still label them as biased and inaccurate?