I'm from Montana. As you all know, Montana has minimal population. It's the fourth largest state by size, but only this year, after 123 years of statehood, did its population hit a million. That tiny number of people is an important detail in the story of what happened to me when Rasmussen called to poll me last Monday. On Monday, there were at least two polls conducted by Rasmussen. As always, they conducted their daily tracking poll on the presidential race--and, a second poll was conducted about the Montana Senate race. The polls were published last Tuesday.
At six-forty PM on Monday night, (the night before they released their Montana Senate poll), during the time they were polling for the Montana Senate race, on my way to yoga, I got a call from Rasmussen Reports.
More intrigue below the fold,...
Understand that I'm a poll junkie. So much so that I subscribed to Rasmussen and Zogby for several election cycles, back when both of them had credibility. Now with RealClearPolitics.com (they offer good good coverage; although they are fairly right wing, they cover both sides of the campaign, and their editors do a great job of giving you the best thinking from both sides), and I also check fivethirtyeight.com, and Pollster.com, so I don't need to pay for bad polling from either Rasmussen or Zogby anymore.
Anyway, I was jacked. Rasmussen had called the wrong guy. They were going to get a little tweak to their Obama popularity numbers from me: I gave him all top ratings on everything except domestic policy. There I gave him a second-level positive response. (If it hadn't been a known Republican pollster, I probably would have given him a lower rating because of his abominable Justice Department and continued destruction of civil liberties, but it wasn't, it was rat-friggin' Rasmussen, the purveyor of all Republican spin, so I said nice things about Obama): Yes, I thought his foreign policy was great; (I do.) Yes, I was going to vote for him in the general election. No, I wasn't going to vote for Romney. Hell, no, I wasn't going to vote for that American Talibanista, Rick Santorum. And, am I very liberal? Nope. Moderately liberal, yes. And I'm an Independent. (Hey, I vote for a Republican a couple times a decade at least.) That was it. Call over. Looking forward to Obama's rating being up a bit in the morning.
Imagine my surprise last Tuesday, when I went to Rasmussen Reports to see what Obama's numbers were from the day before when they had polled me, and I see that Rasmussen had also polled the Montana Senate race yesterday, and my friend Jon Tester, is supposedly down three points to his U.S. Senate opponent, Congressman Denny Rehberg: (And, no, Kos, I don't like his immigration policy, but generally Jon Tester's a great human being: He's done tremendously well by women, by soldiers, by seniors, by farmers, by students and by Montanans--and one of my proudest accomplishments is helping him to get elected in 2006.) But here's the mystery question: On the same day I'm being polled in Montana by Rasmussen about the national election, why was I not getting polled about the Tester race?
So here's my theory. First there is about a one-third of one percent chance that I could legitimately get polled by Rasmussen on the day they poll Montana, and then not get asked about the Tester race--but statistically, that's about 99.67% unlikely. Also, I was on my cell phone and I have NEVER been called by Rasmussen before. If they're randomly polling the country, and they poll 1000 people, then they should call about 3.33 Monanans, since our million in population represents about 1/300th of the U.S. population. HOWEVER, if your automatic poll does the presidential race first, and then your computer program looks for Democrats and Independents who'd vote for either Romney or Santorum, and then, and only then, asks them who they support in the Montana U.S. Senate Race, hey, you can pretty well guarantee that you'll get your right number of Democrats and Independents and several of those "sort of" non-Republicans are going to give you the answer you want to hear--that they're a Democrat or an Independent and they're voting for Rehberg.
So, here's my question to Scott Rasmussen: How many Montanans did you call out of your, perhaps, 1000 national presidential daily polling calls on Monday, Scott? If it was over five, it's suspicious. If it was 10 or more, it's definitely non-random, and if was twenty or more, the books are pretty probably being cooked--but they'll still look good in the morning.
Oh, and one more thing: If Tester's within three points with Rasmussen's methodology, then he's looking pretty good against Rehberg, in spite of all that funny, right-wing money out there getting polls and newspaper editorials and radio programming to turn out just the way that they want.