Rasmussen Offers Excuses For Inaccuracy

The Rasmussen Poll didn't help their reputation in this last election -- either in their swing state polls or their national polls. Respected poll analyst Nate Silver looked at all their polls in the last 21 days before the election, and found they had an average error of 4.2 points (in favor of Romney). Democrats have suspected that Rasmussen tends to favor Republicans, but not by that large a margin. An average error of 4.2 points is simply unacceptable for any polling organization.

Here is what Rasmussen had to say about their election polling:

Our final daily presidential tracking poll showed Romney at 49% and Obama at 48%. Instead, the president got 50% of the vote and Romney 48%. We were disappointed that our final results were not as close to the final result as they had been in preceding elections. There was a similar pattern in the state polls. For example, in Ohio we projected a tie at 49% but the president reached 50% of the vote and the challenger got just 48%. Although every individual result in the battleground states was within the margin of error, the numbers we projected were consistently a bit more favorable for Romney than the actual results.

A preliminary review indicates that one reason for this is that we underestimated the minority share of the electorate. In 2008, 26% of voters were non-white. We expected that to remain relatively constant. However, in 2012, 28% of voters were non-white. That was exactly the share projected by the Obama campaign. It is not clear at the moment whether minority turnout increased nationally, white turnout decreased, or if it was a combination of both. The increase in minority turnout has a significant impact on the final projections since Romney won nearly 60% of white votes while Obama won an even larger share of the minority vote.

Another factor may be related to the generation gap. It is interesting to note that the share of seniors who showed up to vote was down slightly from 2008 while the number of young voters was up slightly. Pre-election data suggested that voters over 65 were more enthusiastic about voting than they had been four years earlier so the decline bears further examination.

That makes it sound like mistakes were made that could have been honestly made by any polling organization. Unfortunately for Rasmussen, most other polling organizations did not make those mistakes and were significantly more accurate than Rasmussen was. Why were they able to see what was happening while Rasmussen wasn't?

There was another old and respected national polling firm that did even worse than Rasmussen. The Gallup Poll showed an average error of 7.2 points (in Romney's favor). Both of these polls need to take a hard look at how they do their polling -- if they are going to stay in the polling business and regain the trust they squandered in this election.