On Mar 18, 2011, at 12:01 PM, Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > My experience with Rasmussen is that their polls are generally pretty > accurate. They are pretty high up in the polling performance stakes in the > US.
Your "experience," whatever that means, is wrong. They used to be good, but have gotten quite bad. See, e.g.: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/rasmussen-poll-on-wisconsin-dispute-may-be-biased/ Also: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/is-rasmussen-reports-biased.html > But there are other respects in which I'm much less sympathetic to > Rasmussen's case. In particular, this has to do with their choices of > question wording and subject matter. The Politico question, for instance, > points toward an August question in which Rasmussen asked "It’s always better > to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not > bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.” That is not a > question designed to elicit the most accurate reflection of public opinion. > > Likewise, Rasmussen recently produced a poll in which they purported to > describe the Democratic health care plan to their respondents. Several other > pollsters have found that support for the plan increases when it is actually > described to respondents, but Rasmussen showed no such increase. However, the > second sentence in their description reads: > > The plans before Congress would prohibit people from choosing insurance plans > with lower premiums and higher deductibles. > I don't particularly know where this comes from; Rasmussen claims that its > questions came from a 'summary of the legislation provided by the New York > Times', but such a depiction of the health care policy appears nowhere in the > New York Times article. But there it is in the Rasmussen survey, where it > appears to be designed to build a relationship in the respondent's mind > between the Democratic plan and higher premiums. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
