In news that I’m sure is shocking to absolutely no one, when last night’s election results are compared to the polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports, it turns out that Scott Rasmussen put a sweaty, slab-like, thumb on the scale in favour of Republican candidates at both the Presidential and US Senate levels. I decided to do a comparison between last night’s results and Rasmussen’s final polls so that I could quantify for all of our information just how much bullshit Rasmussen is shoveling.
Before I get into the meat of the subject, a few ground rules for this comparison. I looked at states for which Rasmussen Reports published polls with field dates falling within the last three weeks (for the vote for President) or the last four weeks (for the Senate races) before the election. If Rasmussen published more than one poll during that period, I looked only at the most recent one. I have calculated what I refer to as a “net miss”, which is stated as either R+X or O+X. That number is calculated by adding or subtracting the amount by which the Rasmussen poll number for each candidate differed from the final result for that candidate. If Rasmussen showed a given race with Romney five points over his final result and Obama three points under his final result, that would be noted as R+8. Continue reading