Be careful what you wish for, Dingy Harry. Looks like you just got it. Sharron Angle, riding a huge tea party/grassroots surge that saw her blow past Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian in Nevada, has opened up an 11-point lead in the Senate race.
My theory on elections is that the winners generally have both the message and the energy. Energy is important, and we see it over and over. The candidates with that intangible energy and excitement behind them generally win. Its not something that can be bought or manufactured easily. We see entrenched incumbents all the time try and manipulate the electorate. But you can't hide behind that. Its now up to Angle not to screw this up. Some have questioned her campaign ability, but she took some serious hard shots from Lowden and ran right through them. Harry Reid used to be an amateur prizefighter so he knows how to fight, and he'll get dirty. Angle seems to have a passionate base to help protect her and she seems more than willing to get in and fight with Reid. The fact is Reid is unpopular in Nevada and Angle just has to run like she did and the primary and she should be fine.
I think we all know about Rasmussen's methodology and what they are all about. They publish polls heavily skewed toward the Republican to support the narrative that is being pushed by the GOP. This will now be endlessly flogged on Fox Noise and by Rush Windbag and all the usual suspects. And you can count on the "liberal" media to help too because this "proves" their narrative about the "anti-incumbent" sentiment in the country.
This stuff is so obvious and so very predictable. It isn't like we haven't seen it many times before.
Rasmussen is a joke. That is if you are looking for serious polling. If you are looking for a narrative driver they are what you want.
You would be foolish to pin your hopes (or God forbid bet money) on a Rasmussen poll.
Posted by: Dan | June 10, 2010 at 03:39 PM
You know what polling place I've grown to really respect . . . PPP. They seem to nail everything.
Posted by: Chris | June 10, 2010 at 05:02 PM
Liberals who whine about Rasmussen are so cute.
The truth is that Rasmussen is the only polling firm to come within half a percent of pegging Bush and Kerry's vote totals in 2004, their accuracy at predicting election totals is exceptional compared to most other firms, and Democrats would prefer to believe utterly insane polls that always show their candidates up 10 points because their likely voter models always stack the deck for Democrats.
2008 is a perfect example: while many polls were showing Obama up by truly ridiculous levels (like 20 and 30 points!) for months and only fixed their likely voter models late in the process to get closer to the likely election results, Rasmussen was showing a fairly modest Obama landslide reproduced later by actual election returns. Whine if you want that Ramussen never showed Obama up by 30 effing points, but those numbers were never relfective of reality.
More recently, liberals' whining about Rasmussen has reached fever pitch due to his low approval results on Obama... but now Gallop has even lower numbers for Obama than Rasmussen.
To top it off, FiveThirtyEight (run by netroot liberals) consistently ranks Rasmussen as one of the most accurate pollsters because they compare pollsters' predictions to actual election returns rather than wishful thinking.
So, yeah, it's pretty cute to see Dems whine about Rasmussen.
Roll this one around, Dan: Gallop has Obama down to 44% approval yesterday. Gallop!
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