A Fellow DU Member (Cicada) Nicely Exposes The (R)asmussen Poll

Obama leads 49 to 48 Rasmussen - if we count leaners

Rasmussen, alone among all polling companies on earth, finds an all time record high number of Americans saying they are Republicans, 37.6% compared to 33.3% Democrats. A lot of other pollsters find something like 5% to 9% more Dems than Republicans. I think only Rasmussen finds more Repubs than Dems. Of course the view of Repubs like Rasmussen is that folks who tell pollsters they are Democrats are obviously lying and need to be statistically eliminated from the sample as unreliable.

Since Rasmussen is alone in this view, since everyone else gets a lot more Democrats, relatively, it is possible he has overmeasured Republicans and his results are underestimating Obama support. In 2010, Nate Silver calculated Rasmussen was the least accurate polling firm that year and had a big fat bias overestimating the vote Republicans would get. I roughly calculate Ras' average overcounting of the Repub share of 2010 votes as three percent.

YET Obama is leading 49 to 48 at Rasmussen today Sept 16 if you count leaners. Of course Rasmussen would rather not count leaners, figuring they will write in Ross Perot, Johnny Depp or Michelle Bachman instead of voting for Romney or Obama I guess, so at Real Clear Politics it shows the result without leaners Romney 47 to Obama 46.

So Obama is leading even tho Rasmussen probably thinks you're lying to him if you say you're a democrat and tends to statistically throw you out of his poll to get to his champion high percent of Republicans