Rasmussen Reports

Not to be confused with Rasmussen Report.

Rasmussen Reports

Founded	2003 (2003)
Founder(s)	Scott Rasmussen
Headquarters	Asbury Park, New Jersey, United States
Products	Opinion polling, news
Website	www.rasmussenreports.com

Rasmussen Reports is an American media company that publishes and distributes information based on public opinion polling. Founded by pollster Scott Rasmussen in 2003, the company updates daily indexes including the President's job approval rating, and provides public opinion data, analysis, and conservative commentary, along with coverage of business, economic, and lifestyle issues. The company claims to have the "most comprehensive public opinion data" and uses the slogan, "If it's in the news, it's in our polls".

History

Scott Rasmussen founded the polling company, GrassRoots Research, in 1995. His company, Rasmussen Research, was bought by TownPagesNet.com for about $4.5 million in ordinary shares in 1999. In 2003, Rasmussen founded Rasmussen Reports, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey; he is currently the president of the company.

Rasmussen Reports polls make use of automated public opinion polling, involving pre-recorded telephone inquiries. These types of polls are believed to produce results at low cost, although some traditional pollsters are skeptical of this methodology and prefer traditional, operator-assisted polling techniques. In addition to political polling, Rasmussen provides public opinion data, analysis, and commentary, along with coverage of business, economic, and lifestyle issues. He describes himself as a market-driven public opinion pollster.

Today

Rasmussen Reports, an electronic media organization, publishes editorial content several times daily on a news cycle. Its content is primarily based upon the company’s independent public opinion surveys, the topics for which are inspired by the week’s media headlines. The company’s Web site, www.RasmussenReports.com, reports on politics, business, and lifestyle issues.

Rasmussen Reports and Gallup are the only two firms that produce daily tracking polls. Both measure the President’s Job Approval on a daily basis. Gallup measures the Approval among all adults while Rasmussen measures it among Likely Voters. Generally, polls of all adults produce results that are more favorable to Democrats than polls of Likely Voters^{[citation needed]}. However, the ratings produced by both firms are quite similar and show the same trends^{[citation needed]}. Each week, Rasmussen Reports updates a Generic Congressional Ballot Poll and a measure of whether the country is heading in the right direction.

Since 2009, Rasmussen Reports has tracked attitudes about the health care reform legislation on a weekly basis. Since the bill became law, Rasmussen Reports has consistently measured support for repeal of the law. The company also provides regular updates on topics including global warming and energy issues, housing, the war on terror, the mood of America, Congress and the Supreme Court, importance of issues, partisan trust and trends.

Rasmussen Reports frequently reports polls showing the gap between what it labels "Mainstream Voters" and the what it labels the "Political Class". Often, the gap between the Rasmussen-identified Mainstream and the Political Class is bigger than the gap between Republicans and Democrats.

In the business realm, Rasmussen Reports released daily updates of Consumer and Investor Confidence with daily tracking back to 2002. The broad trends are similar to measures produced by the Conference Board and University of Michigan, but Rasmussen is the only consumer confidence measure updated daily. The firm also releases a monthly Rasmussen Employment Index, a U.S. Consumer Spending Index and Small Business Watch, sponsored by Discover and a Financial Security Index, sponsored by Country Financial Insurance.

Rasmussen Reports generates revenue by selling advertising, sponsorships, and Platinum Service subscriptions.

All field work (the automated survey calls) for Rasmussen Reports polls is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, a firm that licensed methodology developed by Scott Rasmussen and uses of automated public opinion polling, involving pre-recorded telephone surveys.

Use

Polls by Rasmussen Reports are cited regularly by multiple major news sources, and Rasmussen has appeared as a guest analyst on a number of news broadcasts, including the Fox News Channel, the BBC, CNN, NPR, and CNBC and local television affiliates.

Rasmussen Reports surveys are referred to by those that could be considered U.S. opinion leaders, from media personalities to Congress to the White House. According to The New York Times Magazine, the White House Political Director reported on Rasmussen’s results directly to President Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. The Washington Post reported that Rasmussen’s polls “set off alarm bells inside the Oval Office, according to a senior administration official, who would not be quoted by name discussing private deliberations within the White House.”

Evaluations of accuracy and performance

Favorable

FOX News contributors Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen (a coauthor of Rasmussen) wrote that Rasmussen has an “unchallenged record for both integrity and accuracy.” The Wall Street Journal stated that "Mr. Rasmussen is today's leading insurgent pollster" and "a key player in the contact sport of politics." Slate Magazine and The Wall Street Journal reported that Rasmussen Reports was one of the most accurate polling firms for the 2004 United States presidential election and 2006 United States general elections. In 2004 Slate magazine "publicly doubted and privately derided" Rasmussen's use of recorded voices in electoral polls. However, after the election, they concluded that Rasmussen’s polls were among the most accurate in the 2004 presidential election. According to Politico, Rasmussen's 2008 presidential-election polls "closely mirrored the election's outcome".

In the January 2010 special election for the Senate seat from Massachusetts, Rasmussen Reports was the first to show Republican Scott Brown had a chance to defeat Martha Coakley. Just after Brown's upset win, Ben Smith at Politico reported, “The overwhelming conventional wisdom in both parties until a Rasmussen poll showed the race in single digits in early January was that Martha Coakley was a lock. (It's hard to recall a single poll changing the mood of a race quite that dramatically.)". A few days later, Public Policy Polling released the first poll showing Brown in the lead, a result differing Rasmussen's by 10 points. Rasmussen's second poll on the race found Coakley with a 2-point lead, when she in fact lost by 5 points, a 7-point error.

Criticism

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. However, by later in the year, Rasmussen's polling results diverged notably from other mainstream pollsters, which Silver labeled a "house effect". He went on to explore other factors which may have explained the effect such as the use of a likely voter model, and claimed that Rasmussen conducted its polls in a way that excluded the majority of the population from answering. Silver also criticized Rasmussen for often only polling races months before the election, which prevented them from having polls just before the election that could be assessed for accuracy. He wrote that he was “looking appropriate ways to punish pollsters” like Rasmussen in his pollster rating models who don’t poll in the final days before an election.

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. He singled out as an example the Hawaii Senate Race, in which Rasmussen showed the incumbent 13 points ahead, although in actuality Inouye won by 53 – a difference of 40 points, or "the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998".

Other

TIME has described Rasmussen Reports as a "conservative-leaning polling group". According to Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who co-developed Pollster.com, “He [Rasmussen] polls less favorably for Democrats, and that’s why he’s become a lightning rod." Franklin also said: "It’s clear that his results are typically more Republican than the other person’s results.”

The Center For Public Integrity has claimed that Scott Rasmussen was a paid consultant for the 2004 George W. Bush campaign. 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 Rasmussen’s methodology.

Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls. Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll; 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.'"

External links

• Rasmussen Reports website