As the creator of the Polling and Political Wrap at DK five nights a week, obviously numbers are a particular interest of mine. A few months ago, at the behest of several readers, I moved all polling by Rasmussen into what Crisitunity (writing for the Swing State Project) deemed the "containment pool" at the end of the Wrap.
This was not, as some other folks have written, meant to be a disrespectful shot at the pollster. It was done for a very practical and simple reason. It had grown difficult (barring extensive use of a thesaurus) to write five different paragraphs a day that were variations on the same theme: "Rasmussen has new numbers in the [insert race here], and they show Republicans doing exceedingly well."
In short, it was a nod both to their tendency to be very amenable to the chances of Republican candidates and a nod to their exceptional volume of contributions to the 2010 election cycle.
Was the move justified? You decide:
Let's look first at the conservative bias issue. Whenever the House of Ras is confronted with this charge, they retreat into the mode of insisting that they are an independent pollster, and decrying those on the left (like me) for shooting the messenger. This was their counter when the charges of bias intensified at the start of the year, as reported by Politico's Alex Isenstadt.
But, c'mon...let's be serious. If you want to play yourself off as an unbiased pollster, maybe you don't sign up to be one of the star attractions on a right-wing celebrity cruise sponsored by the National Review. Maybe you don't frame issue questions with language that looks like it came straight from the GOP headquarters.
And, of course, maybe you don't take almost six figures to work for the RNC and George W. Bush as a "consultant", as the House of Ras did in 2003 and 2004.
So, if the rest of the traditional media is unwilling to acknowledge that Rasmussen's outfit has a Republican bias, can we at least stipulate that they have a strong rooting interest in the outcome?
With that stipulated, let's move on to the issue of volume of data, because that's where this story gets really interesting.
* * * * * * * *
One of my summer projects was to pore over three critical sources (Swing State Project, DC's Political Report, and the Wrap) and catalog every general election poll released in 2010.
There are a couple of ground rules that I employed: 1) General election polls only; 2) Polls were removed from the database when the nominees were known (so, no McCollum-Sink polls now exist in the database); 3) As a result of Markos' disassociation with Research 2000, and the rationale for doing so, I excluded their polls from the database, as well.
When all was said and tabulated, there were a total of 953 polls in the database. While I would never presume to say that this represents every poll made available for consumption during 2010 (I used three sources, but it doesn't mean I didn't miss one here and there), I would suspect that this is a pretty thorough cross-section of data.
How prolific has Rasmussen been in this cycle? Rasmussen was responsible for 407 of the polls in the database. Put another way: nearly 43% of all of the polls made available in 2010 have come from a single source.
Add another factor to this Rasmussen polling hegemony. Given the desire to set narratives, Republican pollsters in races from coast-to-coast have flooded the zone with internal polling. As I noted in a Sunday Kos piece in late June, there have been far more Republican-sponsored polls released in 2010 than Democratic ones.
At the time, I estimated the ratio at somewhere between 3-to-1 and 4-to-1. As it turns out, that was dead-on. There have been 142 Republican polls to just 47 Democratic polls.
What this means, though, is that when you add the polls from Rasmussen to the GOP internal polls that have hit the media, the majority of data made available for public consumption (57.7%) have come from sources with a rooting interest that leans precipitously to the right.
By way of contrast, in 2008, Rasmussen accounted for just 20.8% of the polls in my database (a much larger database--2729 polls!--because of the presidential race). Adding GOP internals in, right-leaning data accounted for just 27% of the total, less than half of the proportion of data culled from those types of sources this cycle.
The danger in that is that it is hard to fathom a way in which this does not color the analysis of the 2010 elections. The presumption that Democratic incumbents Earl Pomeroy (ND) and Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (SD) are in grave danger comes solely from Rasmussen polling, because no one else has polled those races this year.
The disparity of Republican vs. Democratic internal polls was covered in depth in that Sunday Kos piece I alluded to earlier. In itself, of course, it could be a sign of a lousy climate.
The conventional wisdom, which in this circumstance might be accurate, is that Democrats are sitting on their numbers because they aren't so hot. To be end, we have seen a number of Dem poll releases that were mystifying, because the toplines were pretty damned pessimistic for the candidate releasing the data.
Rasmussen's hegemony, however, is a different matter. They do not fund their operation like most pollsters. Most pollsters contract with a media outlet or a campaign, and the information gets released through those means. Rasmussen had a relationship with Fox News in 2008, but short of that, they do not appear to be contract pollsters. They make money through subscriptions and advertising.
What this means, in a less-than-amenable economy, is that they can keep plugging along while news bureaus pare back their polling. Rasmussen was still the most prolific pollster in 2008, but there were a number of outfits not far behind. This year, however, they are miles ahead of everyone else in their output.
Which means that they have had a unique opportunity to set the 2010 electoral narrative. While few people are willing to argue that the Republican gains this year will be minimal (and I am not one of those willing to make that argument), it is hard not to conclude that Rasmussen's megaphone in the world of electoral data has allowed the narrative of the ascendant GOP to accelerate further and faster than it ever would have otherwise.
Worse yet, electoral narratives have a nasty tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies. And that, on top of everything else that has them nervous this cycle, has to put Democrats extremely ill at ease.