Gallup still has Obama at 62% with disapprove in the 20s. Why should we believe Rasmussen?
Rasmussen has a better track record?
For starters? Because Gallop is almost always wrong!
Gallup still has Obama at 62% with disapprove in the 20s. Why should we believe Rasmussen?
____________
Because Gallup sucks and is always wrong... duh
I’ll suggest two sources of variance between Rasmussen and other pollsters:
1. Rasmussen uses an automated voice. The answers given by the respondent are to be entered on the DTMF keypad, so the respondent is forced to consider which “bucket” into which to put their response. Live polls have two problems here: first, that the pollster can shade or even intimidate the respondent with the pattern of questions as well as the intonation used, and second, that if the respondent is wishy-washy about which “bucket” into which their answer should be put, the pollster can convince or guide the respondent to answer in ways that bias the result.
2. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been polled several times in the last four years. Every time I’ve been called, the pollster has clearly had an accent or diction that tell me that they’re a) black and b) from the east coast and c) a young adult. I don’t know what their political affiliation is, nor did they ever make noises or responses that would tell me what they thought. But it was quite abundantly clear that they were black, not white, hispanic or asians calling.
Consider the “guilty white liberal” who doesn’t want to offend any black people — if they’re being called by the same polling outfits I’ve been called by (which included polls for GOP primaries, BTW), are these guilty white Volvo-driving, latte-sipping liberals going to be critical of Obama to a live pollster?
Maybe not.
With Rasmussen, you know you’re being polled by a robot. It is a clearly automated voice. Now you’re no longer worried about offending someone on the other end of the phone.