Now that all the rightwinged talking heads are out bellowing that the polls are wrong as they cite Fox's Scott Rasmussen's polls as having them tied.
Ok, everyone reading this with a functioning brain, knows that Scott Rasmussen polls are not trustworthy. But, in a 2010 blast from the past, Nate Silver wrote:
While 2000 was generally a fairly rough year for pollsters, who had to deal with an unenthusiastic electorate, some third-party challengers, and some late-breaking developments like Bush's DUI charge, Rasmussen was the worst of the lot, missing by an average of 5.7 points.
Silver went on to say that Rasmussen screwed up state polling as well.
They also called 7 states wrong.** Some of this was the result of bias, as they were 3.5 points too high on Bush's margin in the states they surveyed, on average.
As you can see from Silver's bar graph ranking pollsters on the 2000 General Election, Rasmussen was, as Nate wrote,
the worst of the lot.
Fast forward to 2010 Mid-Term Election polling, Nate Silver wrote
"Rasmussen Polls Were Biased and Inaccurate; Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA Performed Strongly."
[P]olls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports — which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News — badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.
Silver went on to highlight the huge errors in Rasmussen's polls
Some 13 of its [Rasmussen's] polls missed by 10 or more points, including one in the Hawaii Senate race that missed the final margin between the candidates by 40 points, the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.
Nate went on and wrote:
The 105 polls released in Senate and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen Reports and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points, a considerably higher figure than that achieved by most other pollsters
.
Silver wrote that Rasmussen only got worse with their polling data after President Obama was sworn in.
The discrepancies between Rasmussen Reports polls and those issued by other companies were apparent from virtually the first day that Barack Obama took office. Rasmussen showed Barack Obama’s disapproval rating at 36 percent, for instance, just a week after his inauguration, at a point when no other pollster had that figure higher than 20 percent.
Nate Silver ended his article with this:
Other polling firms that joined Rasmussen toward the bottom of the chart were Marist College, whose polls also had a notable Republican bias, and CNN/Opinion Research, whose polls missed by almost 5 points on average.
So, yeah, rightwinged blathering heads are exploding because Rasmussen has President Obama tied with Mitt Romney .... oooooooook.