It's Official - Reconciliation It Is

BIG E said
That says internet polls only. You didn't think we would catch that did you.
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That still shows a favorable trend and still highlights how Rasmussen clearly has a republican slant to their polls. They have long been shown to have a Republican favorable lean and have been called out many times for framing their polling questions in a misleading manner or in a way favorable to republicans. IE:

From Five Thirty Eight.com (the guy who used statistics to predict the world series and predicted the election down to a tee)

But there are other respects in which I'm much less sympathetic to Rasmussen's case. In particular, this has to do with their choices of question wording and subject matter. The Politico question, for instance, points toward an August question in which Rasmussen asked "It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.” That is not a question designed to elicit the most accurate reflection of public opinion.

Likewise, Rasmussen recently produced a poll in which they purported to describe the Democratic health care plan to their respondents. Several other pollsters have found that support for the plan increases when it is actually described to respondents, but Rasmussen showed no such increase. However, the second sentence in their description reads: <b>
The plans before Congress would prohibit people from choosing insurance plans with lower premiums and higher deductibles.
I don't particularly know where this comes from; Rasmussen claims that its questions came from a 'summary of the legislation provided by the New York Times', but such a depiction of the health care policy appears nowhere in the New York Times article. But there it is in the Rasmussen survey, where it appears to be designed to build a relationship in the respondent's mind between the Democratic plan and higher premiums.</b>

I'm not saying that Rasmussen's question wording is always biased. It isn't. And I'm sure you could find a couple of cases where the wording tend to portray the liberal argument more favorably. But cases like these happen consistently enough with Rasmussen that I'd say it's a concern. And when they do use unorthodox question wording, nine times out of ten it favors the conservative argument. I would describe this as a form of bias -- although it should generally implicate only the poll in question, and not their overall enterprise. In other words, if Rasmussen uses some misleading wording in a health care poll, that means I'm not likely to take that health care poll very seriously -- but it doesn't particularly mean that you should throw out their presidential approval polling, or their Arkansas polling, or their polling on gay marriage, or whatever. Yes, this does mean a bit of extra work -- we have to scrutinize each particular poll for potentially misleading wording -- but that's something that we should be doing more of anyway.

I also have some questions about Rasmussen's choice of subject matter. In particular, they have a knack for issuing polls at times which tend to dovetail with conservative media narratives. Rasmussen, for instance, recently decided to issue a poll about Ben Nelson's standing in Nebraska in light of his vote for health care, which is unpopular in the state. But did they issue a similar poll for Joe Lieberman, who until recently looked like he might vote against the health care bill -- and who opposed the public option, a policy which is very popular in Connecticut? No. They did poll Connecticut in December, but they asked only about Chris Dodd, and not Lieberman. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with polling on Ben Nelson -- or with not polling on Joe Lieberman, who gets polled frequently by home-state pollster Quinnipiac. But if you see this sort of pattern consistently, then it may reflect a certain kind of bias.