The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122219 Message #2693004
Posted By: VirginiaTam
03-Aug-09 - 04:25 PM
Thread Name: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
Subject: RE: BS: Nationalized Healthcare, good? bad?
The Rassmussen Poll out today reports that 48% of Americans believe our current health care is good. Only 19% declared that they thought it was poor.
Who is actually being surveyed? Many poor cannot afford home phone. Many work long and unsocial hours.
Who was surveyed?
Rasmussen And Gallup: Skewing Obama's Approval?
One can make statistics say anything one wants.
snips from the Washington Independent
The question, the result, and the carnival barker spin-all are trademarks of Rasmussen Reports, a pollster that has become ubiquitous in the conversation of Republicans and conservative pundits. It is not a partisan polling firm, and it is not hired to ask partisan questions the way that, for example, John Zogby was hired to test the mocking anti-Obama questions of a conservative radio host. Rasmussen is influential because its carefully crafted questions that produce answers that conservatives like — 59 percent of voters agreeing with Ronald Reagan's view of big government, a 10-point plurality of voters trusting their economic judgment over President Obama's — are bolstered by highly accurate campaign polling. The result is that polls with extremely favorable numbers for Republican stances leap into the public arena every week, quickly becoming accepted wisdom.
.....Scott Rasmussen is well aware of how Republicans use his polling to make their arguments. "Republicans right now are citing our polls more than Democrats because it's in their interest to do so," he said on Monday. "I would not consider myself a political conservative — that implies an alignment with Washington politics that I don't think I have."
But in the early days of his polling firm, when it was named Rasmussen Research, Rasmussen balanced a cold analysis of politics and consumer opinion with advocacy for some conservative views.
.....Since then, Rasmussen's business has boomed, aided in no small part by those "newspaper" questions that are blasted out to reporters and frequently buck up the Republican spin of the week.
Rasmussen. The only poll that matters - the whole story here
hmmmm! Not a pollster I would trust.