@realjohnboy,
realjohnboy wrote:A fair claim, I reckon, but I started to follow the daily Rasmussen Approval Index on President Obama a month or so ago with updates every couple of weeks. I am a Democrat, but I will post the latest updates without trying to spin the results.
Quick word of warning: Rasmussen pretty consistently finds results that diverge rather significantly from what the other pollsters are finding. At least when it comes to Obama's personal (job approval and favourability) ratings.
Here's the chart from pollster.com about Obama's favourability rating (tweaked to exclude internet polls like Zogby's). It's a comprehensive overview of all the poll results. Each dot represents one poll; the lines represent the trendlines. Now take Obama's unfavourable rating. I've taken pollster.com's chart and circled Rasmussen's findings - and those of all the other pollsters.
The difference is smaller but still noticeable when it comes to Obama's job approval rating and where pollsters peg his disapproval rating:
I'm going to go with good faith here and assume that this is the consequence of an honest and legitimate difference in choice of methodology. All pollsters need to make a set of fundamental decisions on methodology, from the choice between anonymous, but in-person interviews and automated calling to the phrasing of the question. Seemingly minor differences can have significant impacts on the findings. Rasmussen probably just makes a different choice on some of those counts.
Those less trustful will, on the other hand, point out that the Rasmussen site's editorial analyses are overwhelmingly written from a Republican/conservative point of view, by people like Michael Barone, Debra Saunders, Lawrence Kudlow and Tony Blankley, and that the pollster seems to be increasingly profiling itself as the conservative's choice of preference. I've got to admit that especially since the last elections, some of the choices of subjects and wording of questions about those subjects in the more topical, ad-hoc polls had me frowning too - though checking now, the last few all sound fair enough to me.
Anyway - when polls vary, you can never know for sure which one is right. Take state polls ahead of a primary or the general election - sometimes, it's the lone dissenter who is proven right. But generally, if one pollster is off on its lonesome in one direction while the consensus points more the other way, I tend to - well, not discount the dissenting poll - but take it with a larger grain of salt than is already advisable. Seems best to me to check in with aggregator sites like
www.pollster.com occasionally - or if you like some partisan flavor,
www.realclearpolitics.com/polls (conservative) or
www.fivethirtyeight.com (liberal), so you can keep an eye on how a pollster's findings compare with those of others.
