'We Don't Care About Being Part of the Club'

Interesting WaPo item about pollster Scott Rasmussen today. We learn a couple of things. One, all the other pollsters seemingly hate his guts, probably because he's the most honest pollster out there, he's usually spot on and he's not a flaming liberal who slants his poll like most of them do.

Second, he conceived ESPN?

Here is a fun fact for those in the political polling orthodoxy who liken Scott Rasmussen to a conjurer of Republican-friendly numbers: He works above a paranormal bookstore crowded with Ouija boards and psychics on the Jersey Shore.

Here's the fact they find less amusing: From his unlikely outpost, Rasmussen has become a driving force in American politics.

As cash-strapped newspapers and television networks struggle to meet the growing demand for polls, Rasmussen, 54, is supplying reams of cheap, automated surveys that will measure -- and maybe move -- opinion, especially as primary season gives way to the November midterm elections. A co-founder of the sports network ESPN and former play-by-play broadcaster, Rasmussen is an articulate and frequent guest on Fox News and other outlets, where his nominally nonpartisan data is often cited to support Republican talking points. In October, he hired his own communications director to handle the daily deluge of press calls. He has a mini-TV studio in his office.

The notion he's on the right side, naturally, has the left declaring war on him, with snide jealousy just oozing from other pollsters in today's piece.

"He has got a conservative constituency, he has Fox News and the Washington Times and Drudge," said John Zogby, the pollster whose publicity-seeking business model is considered a forebear of Rasmussen's. "The conservative result is the one that is going to get a huge level of coverage."

Zogby long ago forfeited his credibility and probably curses Rasmussen's very existence, as do others.

"The firm manages to violate nearly everything I was taught what a good survey should do," said Mark Blumenthal, a pollster at the National Journal and a founder of Pollster.com. He put Rasmussen in the category of pollsters whose aim, first and foremost, is "to get their results talked about on cable news."

Gee, a guy looking to get some notice? What a stunner. But the fact is if he had no credibility and a track record of accuracy, nobody on cable or talk radio would be calling. Maybe the sniveling Blumenthal ought to consider that.

Nate Silver, who runs the polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight, soon to be hosted on the Web site of the New York Times, faults Rasmussen for polling only likely voters, which reduces the pool to "political junkies."

Yeah, why poll likely voters, considering they're, um, most likely to vote and most likely to produce a more accurate result?

"It paints a picture of an electorate that is potentially madder than it really is," agreed Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew Research Center and vice president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). "And potentially more conservative than it really is."

As opposed to all the other samples we typically see where Democrats are 40% of the sample, independents and Republicans about 30%. As if they're not skewed so as to show an electorate potentially more liberal than it really is?

Rasmussen dismisses this nonsense.

"If I really believed for a moment that if we played by the rules of AAPOR or somebody else they would embrace us as part of the club, we would probably do that," he said, his voice taking on an edge. "But, number one, we don't care about being part of the club."

That irritation extended toward traditional news outlets -- including this one -- that have refused to cite his polls. As a result, he argued, newspapers and networks were ludicrously late in recognizing the rise of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. His polling detected that groundswell earlier than most competitors and set off alarm bells inside the Oval Office, according to a senior administration official, who would not be quoted by name discussing private deliberations within the White House.

"Even if you don't like our poll and think the activists are idiots for paying attention to us," he said, the results were "part of the discussion."

And it's why he's the most trusted pollster out there, whether anyone likes it or not.