This is enormously funny:
Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama’s popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.
The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party’s national agenda.
On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. “Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale,” blared the Daily Kos this summer. “Rasmussen Reports, You Decide,” the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.
“I don’t think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does,” said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, a progressive research center. “His data looks like it all comes out of the RNC…
And except for the fact of Rasmussen’s amazing accuracy, there’s really nothing good about his polls, ya know? Democrats: if you are afraid to hear the worst, then let the worst unheralded fall upon your heads.
The thing about Rasmussen – the thing which gives the poll great importance – is the amount of polling done. Its a very large number of poll respondents done continually. Even if Rasmussen’s models were wrong, they’d still pick up trends, and that is the best thing any pollster can do. We don’t need to know, really, what particular percentage of votes will be GOP or Democrat come this November, but it is good to know how the populace is viewing issues in a general sense. And, so, Ramussen’s polling of Obama’s strong approve/strong disapprove number is useful – it doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfectly right (though I think its accurate), the fact that the trend has been all downwards for months is both important and incontrovertible…as has, now, been picked up by all other polling agencies.
But the enormously funny thing is that these lefty attacks on Rasmussen just make Rasmussen’s polls more known to the public and thus more likely to be used by not just center/right outfits, but even by the regular MSM. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson after their pointless and self-defeating attacks on Rush, O’Reilly and Fox news…nothing quite a dumb as a liberal, I guess.
HAT TIP: Black and Right
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