See you tomorrow ;-)
Archive for May 1st, 2011
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Monday, May 2
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50?! with rasmussen?!
I don’t know of anyone who takes Rasmussen polls seriously - I doubt they do themselves.
Eric Boehlert, 2010 (a senior fellow with Media Matters, a progressive research center): “I don’t think there are Republican polling firms that get as good a result as Rasmussen does. Their data looks like it all comes out of the RNC [Republican National Committee].”
Nate Silver concluded that Rasmussen’s polls were the least accurate of the major pollsters in 2010, having an average error of 5.8 points and a pro-Republican bias of 3.9 points according to Silver’s model. He singled out as an example the Hawaii Senate Race, which Rasmussen showed the incumbent 13 points ahead, where he in actuality won by 53 - a difference of 40 points, or “the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.”
Still, though, the media loves quoting their numbers when they look particularly poor for the President. But I’m not sure you’ll hear much about this today:
Rasmussen has the President at 50%, up four points in less than a week - and that’s the first time they’ve had him on 50 or over since February 11. And his ‘disapproval’ figure is down seven points in just over a month (it’s still high - 49 - but this is Rasmussen after all). All this with high gas prices?
Whisper it ;-)
I’m guessing an urgent internal enquiry has been launched in the company!
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PS Remember the media blitz when Gallup had the President on 41% a couple of weeks ago? He’s on 46 today. Up five in a fortnight? Despite gas prices, Libya, etc? How many, eh, ‘Obama recovering in polls!’ stories did you read today? Exactly.
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Just to clarify, I’m not saying we should be obsessed with polls, I’m just picking up on that tired old fact that the media only ever make a big deal of them when they’re bad for the President - they’re more encouraging today, so, naturally enough, they’re being ignored.
Johann Hari (The UK Independent): Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.
Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” – but that wasn’t enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay”, and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN’s polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality…..
…So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered.
Read the full article here
This is brilliant Edwina, thank you so much for the link
White House.gov
