Might Coakley Lose?

MAJOR UPDATE: Public Policy Polling is out with its results now, and Coakley is trailing by a point. (Within the margin of error, but still....)

Senate elections are to me the most fascinating in American politics because, from an intergovernmental perspective, they are contests for federal office conducted on a statewide level but often with significant local factors at play. Other than the seven smallest states that elect their lone, at-large House member statewide, Senate contests are unique in this way. One reason that presidential results tend to be rather consistent across cycles, especially of late, is that candidate factors--aside from home-state connections--are essentially held constant across the states, making the result a purer referendum on the ideological-partisan identity of each state. But because every Senate race has its own candidates and campaigns, and the elections themselves are staggered, Senate delegations can split in a way Electoral College results--Maine and Nebraska aside--cannot.

Nevertheless, thanks to increasing party polarization on the state and even regional level, the number of split-state delegations since the 1970s, according to Daniel Butler and Matthew Butler, has been falling steadily and, of late, more rapidly. The figure immediately below, shared with 538 by Daniel Butler, shows the historical pattern. At present, if you count Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman as caucusing Democrats, fewer than one-fourth of American states--a dozen, depicted in second figure below--have split delegations.

Massachusetts is perhaps the state one least expects to have a split-state Senate delegation. It has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee each of the past six cycles. (Only Minnesota has a longer streak.) Since 1984, when John Kerry first won his current seat as the Bay State's now-senior senator, it has had two Democratic senators. It is the largest state in the nation with a one-party House delegation, too: All 10 Massachusetts' representatives are Democrats. The Dems also control both chambers of the state legislature and the governorship. I cannot think of a similarly-sized state at present that is so thoroughly dominated by Republicans.

All of which is wind up to say that the Republican nominee Scott Brown ought to be dreaming if he thinks he can beat Democrat Martha Coakley to win the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy's seat, right?

Not so fast. As Washington Indy's Dave Weigel points out, Coakley hasn't exactly pulled away in this contest: Public Public Polling's Tom Jensen reports new numbers showing Coakley with a 9-point lead in what Jensen now deems a potentially "losable race" for the Democrats. (Correction: Rasmussen poll showed a 9-point lead, but it was Jensen who referred to it this week as a "losable" race. Sorry for the confusion on the poll origins.)

Coakley--who, and maybe this is just me, bears a resemblance to former Democratic veep nominee Geraldine Ferraro--will probably hang on to win, maybe even by a comfortable margin. But the Republicans couldn't be better situated. This is not a regularly-scheduled race in a presidential cycle, or even a regularly-scheduled race in a lower-turnout midterm cycle. It's a special election in January of a midterm cycle year in which the Democrats have unified control of the state and national governments at a time of voter unease. If lower turnouts in midyear cycles tend to help Republicans, turnout during a special election on a (cold?) January day could be even worse and, thus, less likely to favor Coakley.

Further compounding the situation is the very short turnaround time Coakley, as nominee, has had to establish herself and her campaign operation during the holiday-interrupted, six-week sprint between winning the nomination on December 8 and the upcoming January 19 special general election. All else equal, a longer period between primary and general dates probably favors the stronger state party, much in the way that the better team during a 162-game baseball season often loses in a short playoff series. So the timing of the special election actually works two ways against Coakley and the Democrats.

Again, she'll probably hold on. But the temporal-electoral stars are aligned about as good as they can be for Brown and the Massachusetts GOP. Teddy must be rolling over in his grave.

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Afghanistan - U.S. Politics in 2010

Back in August, I suggested that the Obama administration might be best served by getting Afghanistan off the front page as soon as they can, while at the same time working to implement the promised strategy change that was committed during the campaign and first elaborated on in March. By the end of 2009, the policy review was completed and a new strategy in place, including an increase in troop levels, broader regional focus and the basics of a U.S. exit strategy.

Almost immediately after the initial reactions to the announced strategy -- and in part because it was done in the last month of the year -- Afghanistan took a back seat to other issues on the table in the American political dialogue. On the foreign policy front, the Copenhagen climate conference and the attempted Christmas Day plane bombing sent Afghanistan significantly down in the public eye, at least as measured by (a cropped snapshop of) a Google Trends search on the term "Afghanistan."

For the U.S. public, Afghanistan, perhaps more quickly than other issues he "inherited" from the Bush administration, is likely to become a major part of President Obama's legacy. As such, the adminstration's preference would probably be for Afghanistan to stay on the back burner until such time as there is good news to report, perhaps something like "the strategy is working and a 2011 start to drawdown is still feasible."

But what about the congressional elections of 2010? And what incentives do the Republican opposition in Washington have to play along with Obama's preferred storyline? As well, how does the anti-war left feel about Obama's quite centrist (stronger military presence plus increased focus on regional and internationl cooperation) route in the region?

1. Congress and the 2010 mid-term election: As we examined last year, while having several powers over foreign policy of the U.S., the Congress blows hot and cold regarding it's engagement and concern on foreign affairs. On the one hand, incumbents from an unpopular Congress are not likely to campaign on the platform of an unpopular war. At the same time, there are basically no votes that challengers can stick to incumbents regarding Afghanistan (though some members wanted one for the recent troop increase), making it slightly more difficult to politicize.

On the other hand, the Afghanistan war represents several of the major concerns that anti-incumbents, including those from the far-ish left and far-ish right, are concerned about and must emphasize in their opposition campaigns. Those who want to slash government spending, end or reduce U.S. military interventions abroad, or just generally punish either the Bush legacy or the Obama adminstration can all find something to criticize.

In conclusion, incumbents, except those who come from very safe districts, are likely to stay away from the issues as much as possible . Challengers should jump on it in a big way.

2. Republicans (and Conservatives) more generally: Using month's breakdown of the factions of the U.S. right (graphic here), it is likely that there will be a plurality of strategies taken by the party out of power.

A. Pro-business community: At the end of the day, high military spending is good for business for many influential players in the United States. Many big companies or their subsidiaries have contracts with Defense Department or others, while few American companies have lost business as a result of the war. As a political player, however, other issues are more important to the community as a whole.

B. Social conservatives: My read is that social conservatives are split on the issue, with some more in favor of withdrawal and others quite supportive of the war effort. However, Afghanistan is not nearly as much of an area of focus as domestic issues. That said, many social conservatives overlap with the other three categories on FP issues.

C. Populist Libertarians, Tea-partiers: Fairly strongly against troop escalation among the isolationists and anti-spending people. Someare in favor, however, causing a bit of a rift here. Strategy will depend on the candidate -- Bill Owens in NY-23 ran on a "support for the war on terrorism" platform, without explaining specifics regarding Afghanistan.

D. Foreign policy hawks/ Neo-conservatives: Strongly in favor of the war, but many believe that Obama is doing it too softly. Strategy will be to continue to press that Obama is weak on foreign policy.

Summing up the conservative side, there is significant fragmentation on the Afghanistan issue among the American right, sometimes even within important segments of the conservative movement. Perhaps the one thing we can say is that there is less fragmentation among "old" Republican factions, Business and FP hawks, and more among the "new" movements like the tea-partiers, with the social conservatives somewhere in the middle.

3. Liberals and the Center-left (many but not all Democrats): Much like on healthcare, American liberals split on how to respond to the Obama Afghanistan strategy. Many are opposed to the escalation, while still others are willing give the Obama adminstration the "benefit of the doubt." Among mainline center-left and centrist Democrats, however, the war effort is more popular. Conservative Democrats (many of whom fall into the social conservative category) are more in favor.

Again, the spectrum is mixed on the left as well as the right, with competing interests and ideologies conflicting among the left side. Don't look for a coherant message on Afghanistan from Democrats outside of the White House until the adminstration signals that it wants to bring the issue up. While there may more more threats of liberal revolt, it is unlikely that many on the left will vote against Democratic congress(wo)men this fall as a result of the Afghanistan conflict.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

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Rasmussen, Teabaggers, and Type II Error

As many people have noticed, Rasmussen's polls this year have tended to be more favorable to Republican candidates and causes than those of most other polling outfits.

This does not necessarily imply bias. It could result from a whole number of things, ranging from the fact that they're applying a likely voter screen when most other pollsters aren't, to some sort of methodological quirk, to the fact that they're just doggone right.

But the degree of the "house effect" seems to vary according to the nature of the candidate. When the candidate is a mainstream or liberal-ish Republican, like the candidates in Missouri or Ohio or Connecticut or Illinois, Rasmussen's numbers don't seem to differ all that much from other pollsters; maybe a couple of points, on average. But if the candidate is more of an "insurgent" conservative with ties to or roots in the tea-party movement, you can see some really big differences.

Take, for example, their recent polls in Kentucky and Florida. In each case, you have someone who gets the tea-partiers excited (Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, respectively) running against a more traditional mainline Republican.

The other pollsters, for the time being, have the mainline Republican doing better; in Rasmussen's case the opposite is true. In Florida, Quinnipiac has Charlie Crist outperforming Marco Rubio by a net of 23 points against the Democrat, and Research 2000 by 25 points. But Rasmussen has Rubio doing 8 points better. A similar trend manifests itself in Kentucky for Rand Paul in his matchup against Daniel Mongiardo, although is not so apparent against the other Democrat, Jack Conway.



I've also included the percentages of voters in each survey who had a strong enough opinion about a candidate to rate him -- this is not exactly the same thing as name recognition, but it's pretty close so we'll use that term as a shorthand. Research 2000 and Quinnipiac have Rubio with name recognition of 43 percent and 38 percent, respectively -- Rasmussen has him at 80 percent. PPP and Research 2000 have Rand Paul with name recognition at 49 and 55 percent; Rasmussen has him at 81. (EDIT: To be fair, some of this is because Rasmussen's polls are somewhat more recent -- they had Rubio at 71 percent name recognition in August and 72 percent in October, and Paul at 74 percent in September.)

This, at least, helps to explain why their results are different: the voters in their survey are much more likely to be tuned in and to have heard of candidates like Rubio and Paul, and are therefore more likely to say that they'll vote for them. Rasmussen, I'm sure, would say that this is because they're using a likely voter screen whereas the other pollsters are not.

But personally, I just don't buy that 80 percent of the people who will eventually vote in November have an opinion about Rand Paul or Marco Rubio right now. These candidates are relatively fresh faces in their respective states; the political class may know about them, but most voters (even "likely" ones) aren't going to tune in to the horse race stuff for several more months and may have at best a passing knowledge of the candidates at this stage.

Moreover, the differences in name recognition are really large. Suppose that Quinnipiac is right that Rubio has 38 percent name recognition among registered voters. Suppose moreover that all of the people who have heard of Rubio are people who are going to vote in November and are properly identified as likely voters.

Turnout in midterm elections is usually in the range of 60 percent of registered voters, and will probably be somewhat higher than that in Florida where there are two highly competitive races. But let's say it's 60 percent, and you can identify this 60 percent with 100 percent accuracy. If that's the case, the highest Rubio's name recognition should theoretically be in your poll is 63 percent, which is 38/60. But Rasmussen had him at 71 percent two months before the Quinnipiac poll was conducted, has him at 80 percent now. Some of this could result from differences in question wording; Quinnipiac, for instance, explicitly gives the respondent a choice of "or haven't you heard enough about him?". Nevertheless, the Rasmussen respondent always seems ready to take a position on just about everything, including candidates and issues that other pollsters show he doesn't know very much about. This perhaps reflects a form of Type II error or "false negatives" -- leaving people out of your sample who should be included, specifically people who are less well informed but who do vote.

Although it seems likely that Rasmussen is winding up with an over-tight sample of voters, I don't think that they're doing so intentionally. If you're a robopollster, you're lucky enough to get someone to complete your survey 10 months out from a Congressional election when call screening is becoming more and more common and people have a lot of other things -- notably the economy -- to worry about. And, unlike the other robopollsters like SurveyUSA and PPP, Rasmussen does all their polling in one evening, so if they miss you the first time around, you're out of their sample. Their response rates have to be very low. If someone has picked up the phone and completed your survey, that's probably all the indication you need that they're engaged by politics and they'll probably vote come November.

But then Rasmussen applies a likely voter screen on top of that. This is probably overkill. If you're Quinnipiac, and you have a huge academic budget and a whole room full of trained professional interviewers and are in the field for five or six days, then you can and perhaps should be applying a likely voter screen, even at this early stage. If you're Rasmussen and doing a blitz poll, your voters have pretty much already been screened for you. It's even possible that your sample is already too tight before the likely voter screen and that you'd theoretically want to make it looser, although there's really no good way to do that.

Weighting by party ID, as Rasmussen does, gives a pollster a pretty big fudge factor, but only provided that the response biases in your sample come between the categories that you're weighting by and not within them. Rasmussen's weighting scheme might guarantee that they have more or less the right number of Republicans or the right number of Hispanics -- but it can't guarantee that they'll have the right kind of Republicans or the right kind of Hispanics, particularly for amorphous factors like ideology which can be hard to proxy. It's possible, for instance, that they'd wind up with Republicans who were too informed and/or too conservative relative to other Republicans. If that's the case, it would probably manifest itself in the way that certain Republican candidates performed vis-à-vis other ones, as we may be seeing in their polling of Kentucky and Florida.

By the way, this is not necessarily an indictment of the ultimate accuracy of Rasmussen's polls. This "bug" may even be helpful to them! It's quite possible the uber-tuned-in voters that they're sampling are "early adopters", and the rest of the electorate will follow their lead. But in that sense, their polls are more like predictions and less snapshots of current public opinion.

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This is Great News! For Sarah Palin! (Really)

I find this truly remarkable: in a National Journal survey of 109 Republican "party leaders, political professionals and pundits", not a single one deemed Sarah Palin to be the most likely Republican nominee.

I've written extensive commentary about how I think Palin's chances are in fact pretty decent. I'd probably call her the "favorite", although "favorite" in this context might mean having a 25-30 percent chance of winning. From my list of ten bullet points, this one stands out as the most important:

8. Attempts by the Republican Establishment to neuter her may backfire. This is a corollary of #6 ["She's tough to campaign against"] above. If the Establishment, owing to electability concerns or whatever else, tries to put hurdles in her way by re-structuring the primary or delegate allocation process, it may only play into the victimization complex of Palin and her supporters.

2010/12 is shaping up to be an anti-Establishment cycle. The Republican Establishment is not popular, to a large extent even within their own party, and certainly not among "conservatives" more broadly, only 55 percent of whom have a favorable image of the G.O.P.

Palin has some obvious flaws as a candidate. But she's the best equipped to bridge the divide between the Tea Party and the Republican Party. In some ways, indeed, the "message" that she unveiled in 2008: a mish-mash of populism, everywomanism, and paranoia -- coupled with a light touch on policy specifics -- has proven to be highly prescient in terms of everything that has come thereafter. And most of the other candidates have flaws that are at least as significant: Romney has his Mormonism, his flip-flops, and his MassCare; Huckabee has Maurice Clemmons and is despised by the establishment every bit as much as Palin, and Tim Pawlenty has become the dweeb trying to keep up with the Cool Kids -- we live in a branded world, and in a branded world, the inability to differentiate oneself is death. John Thune comes out looking pretty good, I guess, but he's also the least exposed so that could change.

But back to the point I made in November -- there's going to come a time, probably in July 2011 or so, where the knives are really drawn on Palin and Republican pundits, strategists and candidates start saying in public some of the things they've been thinking in private. And that in all likelihood will play very well for her. Although the Establishment's concerns about Palin's viability as a general election candidate are well grounded, mostly they're just terrified of her because she doesn't need them.

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The Retirement Paradox: What's Strategic for the Politician is Not So Good for the Party

One thing I learned in econ class in 11th grade was that government policy should be counter-cyclical (spending more in recessions and cutting back in boom times), but that there’s a lot of pressure to be pro-cyclical, which will tend to exacerbate business cycles. (Except I suppose they didn’t say “exacerbate” in 11th grade.) At a personal level, too, it’s natural to spend more when we have more and cut back when we aren’t doing so well. Every now and then you hear about a “rainy day fund” but my general impression is that these are never big enough to counter the business cycle.

Political parties seem to apply a similar pro-cyclical behavior in their congressional election campaigns.

Consider 2008. As expected, it was a good year for the Democrats, and so it was a logical time for them, as a party, to make some investments in new, young candidates. 2008 was the time they should've encourage lots of their incumbents to retire, because in that year they could win a lot of these districts without needing the incumbency advantage (estimated to be about 10% of the vote, i.e., enough to take you from 50% to 60%). Conversely, 2008 was the time for the Republican Party to hold on to what it had, and to keep all their incumbents in, trying to hold out until 2010 when the pendulum might swing back in their favor. But we didn’t see that—actually, something like 30 Republican House members retired in 2008. Republicans retiring, Democrats sticking around--that was a recipe for big Democratic gains. But then in 2010, or 2014, or whatever year it is when the Democrats get wiped out—then a bunch of their incumbents will probably retire, and boy will the Democrats wished they had put in younger incumbents back in 2008 when they had a chance!

This election cycle we've been seeing this happen from the other direction:

Democratic Senators Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota announced this week that they would retire from their long-held seats rather than face uphill battles in this year’s midterm elections. Several House Democrats from conservative districts have said they will step down. The Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, has made the same decision.

The flip side of this was in 2008, when 84-year-old Frank Lautenberg ran for reelection in New Jersey. That was a Democratic year when the Democrats might've done well with just about anybody. (Or maybe not; I don’t really follow New Jersey politics and am just extrapolating from national polls.) When 2014 rolls around, they’re going to need to find someone new, and at that point they might wish they had an incumbent already in the slot.

What makes sense for the individual officeholder--stay in when you think you'll have an easy win, and wait to quit when the going is getting tough--isn't so helpful for the national party.

One of the difficulties here is that I’m talking about the long-term goals of the parties, but “the parties” are, to a large extent, simply their officeholders. And congressmembers’ incentives can be much different from those of the party as a whole. In particular, it makes sense that an incumbent congressmember will want to quit in a year when he or she would be facing a tough reelection battle, and when the prize for winning is to remain in the minority. Conversely, why step down when you’re facing an easy reelection and the prospect of some juicy committee assignments? So the individual officeholders have an incentive for pro-cyclical behavior, even if it harms their party’s long-term interest.

Beyond the benefits or lack thereof to the individual parties, pro-cyclical behavior would seem to increase the size of political changes, making the swings in congressional representation larger than would be expected simply based on swings in public opinion. Actually, many political scientists would consider this a good thing (an increased “swing ratio”); my point here is that some of this swing is “endogenous” in the sense of arising from pro-cyclical decisions of individual congressmembers deciding whether to run for reelection. It would be interesting to see if this happens with state legislatures as well.

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2010 Senate Races Present Rewards, but Higher Risks for Democrats

Producing content for the Internet requires that one doesn't bury his lead, so I'm going to show you this chart first, but please interpret it cautiously and pay heed to all the caveats and disclaimers below. The numbers you see are not formed by any statistical program; they are informed, but fuzzy, guesstimates.



I periodically get inquiries about why, considering that FiveThirtyEight is a numbers-driven website, I've tended to take a more qualitative take on the 2010 Senate picture. The reason is that -- as the completely unexpected retirement of Byron Dorgan and the somewhat unexpected retirement of Chris Dodd amply demonstrated -- there is still substantial uncertainty about the identities of the candidates. I do try to factor these things into my estimates -- I don't see how you can't -- but it obviously relies upon a fair amount of guesswork. Once the field starts to settle down a bit and some of the races that haven't gotten adequate polling -- like Colorado or Iowa -- begin to get a bit more of it, we will transition into a more systematic approach. That will probably occur sometime in the mid-late Spring. For the time being, however, a good subjective estimate is probably going to be more informative than an "objective" answer that relies on all sorts of potentially false assumptions and treats the ridiculously early polling as the gospel truth.

That doesn't mean, however, that I don't think about the races quantitatively. In fact, I generally have a pretty good working idea of the probability I'd assign to a given seat switching hands. I'm reluctant to publish these as a matter of course, since when you begin to put specific numbers out there, people may assume that you're more certain about a race than you really are. Nevertheless, in light of what I think is somewhat inaccurate conventional wisdom that has developed around the 2010 Senate picture, it is probably worth "showing my work" on occasion. What you see above, then, are my very rough and premature estimates of probabilities of the various competitive and potentially competitive Senate seats switching hands.

If I aggregate my estimates from the individual races, I show Republicans picking up an average of 4.60 Democratic seats, but also, Democrats picking up an average of 2.65 Republican seats, for a net Republican gain of 1.95 seats.

But this is very important: the average is somewhat noninformative here, as these races do not operate independently from one another. It is somewhat unlikely -- though certainly not impossible -- that Republicans will pick up 4-5 Democratic seats and Democrats will pick up 2-3 Republican seats. If the national environment continues to improve for the Republicans, for example, perhaps they'll pick up six or all seven of the seats that are basically toss-ups or better (everything from Illinois upward), and perhaps put another race like California or Wisconsin into play, while defending one or all but one of their own seats.

On the other hand, if conditions improve for the Democrats, perhaps they can hold their losses to 2-3 seats (say North Dakota plus one or two from the group DE/NV/CO/AR) while picking up Missouri, perhaps two from the OH/KY/NH group, and one from the NC/FL/LA group. In that case, Democrats could hold at 60 seats or even improve their numbers to 61-62.

There are an unusually large number of Senate races in play this year and as such there is an unusually large amount of uncertainty surrounding the outcome. It also bears remembering that, although I remain quite pessimistic about what will happen to Democrats in the House, the Senate playing field is intriniscally more favorable to them. The Senators who are up for re-election this year are those who were elected in 2004 -- a good cycle for Republicans. And while Democrats were hurt by their retirements in North Dakota, Delaware, New York, Illinois and probably Colorado (they were helped by Chris Dodd's retirement in Connecticut), the Republicans have created opportunities for them with the retirements in Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire and perhaps Florida (they were helped by Jim Bunning's retirement in Kentucky). If the 2006 senate class were up for re-election this year, Democrats would potentially face very substantial losses, but fortunately for Democrats they aren't.

As such, I don't think it can be taken for granted that Democrats won't keep their "filibuster-proof" majority, or even expand upon it; I might put this possibility at something like 25-30 percent, following the Dorgan/Dodd retirements. On the other hand, the Democrats might also lose five, six, seven seats ... or perhaps more. I don't think the possibility of their losing their majority rates as higher than a small, single-digit number, although it cannot totally be ruled out if unexpected events (incapacitation of Robert Byrd and/or Daniel Inouye, a party switch from Joe Lieberman and/or Ben Nelson) come into play.

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Dodd Joins Dorgan on Sidelines; Blumenthal Enters as Heavy Favorite

UPDATE: 9:39 AM EST. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal will seek Chris Dodd's seat, reports the New York Times.

As a result, Connecticut has been demoted further to 15th on our Senate race rankings. Public Policy Polling had a poll in the field this weekend, which has yet to be released but which will report that Blumenthal's entry will make the seat "uber safe" for Democrats. In addition, previous polling from Quinnipiac had found Blumenthal with exceptionally strong numbers -- a 79/13 (!) approval rating as of July -- and running well in prospective horse-race match-ups.

Original story, revised as of 9:30 AM EST. FiveThirtyEight had an early bedtime last night, and since senior Democrats are retiring at a rate of approximately one every three hours, we missed the news that Chris Dodd would also be retiring. But obviously, this news is of a vastly different character than the earlier announcement that Byron Dorgan would not seek re-election.

Dodd's problems were mostly his own, and pre-dated any issues that the Democrats were having with the national environment. I had suggested way back in April, at which time Dodd's approval ratings were already in the red, that the Democrats ought to consider primarying or Bunninging him. Although there had seemed to be some chance that Dodd's problems were mostly attributable to the AIG bonus scandal, a matter over which public anger has somewhat dissipated and for which Dodd was somewhat unfairly blamed, his approval ratings had yet to really recover and his problems now appear to be more general, stemming from a variety of controversies relating to his roles and relationships with companies tied to the financial bailout, as well as perhaps an ill-advised run for President in 2007-08 that most Connecticutians found pointless.

The remaining Democratic challenger for the moment is Merrick Alpert, who has quietly run a competent campaign but lacks experience and had only achieved 4 percent name recognition with Connecticut's voters. However, the Democrats have a deep bench in Connecticut, including attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who according to an upcoming poll by Public Policy Polling, would make the seat "uber safe" for Democrats, as well as Joe Lieberman foil Ned Lamont (who was thought likely to run for governor, but could re-consider), as well five U.S. Representatives, most notably the popular progressive Rosa DeLauro.

Any of those people, as well as possibly Alpert, would be a favorite against the Republican field, which consists of a decent-to-good candidate in former U.S. Rep Rob Simmons, as well as a number of vanity candidates who would likely be problematic nominees.

Connecticut drops, for the time being, to 12th on our Senate rankings list; it may drop another couple positions if someone like Blumenthal or DeLauro enters, and it may drop or rise depending on the performance of Martha Coakley in neighboring Massachusetts in the special election later this month.

It would be too convenient to suggest that Democrats are better off than they were 24 hours ago -- although it's somewhat close. I had thought that Democrats had a 50-60 percent chance of losing the Connecticut seat; I would now put those odds at more like 20-30 percent, pending further developments (EDIT: with Blumenthal's entry, probably more like 10-20 percent). On the other hand, while I had thought that they only had about a 20 percent chance of losing in North Dakota (much higher if John Hoeven had entered, but that was highly uncertain), those odds would now seem to be 75-80 percent or higher.

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Tea Partiers Bag Another One

There they go again.

From the Sunshine State came news today of the resignation, in the face of a concerted attack by Republican Party purists, of state GOP chairman and Charlie Crist ally Jim Greer. The departing chairman did not, however, exit before lashing out at those who he says took him down and, in his opinion, are destroying the Florida GOP.

"Since 2007, I have made a point to put the best interest of the Party before my own, even when criticisms were misdirected and invalid, and I will do so again now," wrote Greer in his resignation letter. "While some are more interested in tearing and shredding the fabric of the Republican Party to pieces, I will not be a participant in this destructive behavior. Therefore, I am putting the future of our Party first and shall step down as Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida effective February, 20, 2010." (Greer will be replaced by state senator John Thrasher of Jacksonville.)

The party-line response of Democrats to the news of Greer's resignation was issued by Democratic National Committee chair Tim Kaine: "Today’s right-wing led coup of Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer is a telling and unsettling sign about the extreme direction of the Republican Party--a direction that is narrowing the Party ideologically, demographically and, ultimately, electorally. We’re not even a full week into 2010 and the extreme right wing of the Republican Party has claimed another trophy for its wall--adding Greer to Senator Specter and Dede Scozzafava in its quest to purify the Republican Party, eliminate moderate voices and enact an extreme right-wing agenda."

A few tidbits and reactions:

*As noted in various reports, this was in many respects a proxy fight in the larger battle between Crist and conservative poster-boy Marco Rubio for the GOP senate nomination. That tea partiers backing the insurgent Rubio's nomination bid were able to claim such a scalp is pretty impressive, whatever one thinks of them. They are causing mainstream Republicans to take extreme caution so as not to incite them. Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee chair who was already having a rough day after he angered House Republicans by stating that they would not be able to take back the House this November, said Greer "understood that his presence was creating more division than necessary." Steele has to dance more gingerly right now than any Republican not running for president.

*Top party leaders were expressing their frustration about a pending Greer takedown just a few weeks ago, and with impassioned language of their own. Read this open letter from state GOP rules chairman Jim Stelling, who late last month called out a whole list of people by name who he said will not stop until the party "is in ruins." This fight could get very, very ugly.

*Democrats seem genuinely delighted. Hoping to limit their losses in 2010, one mitigating circumstance is the degree to which the GOP is distracted with intra-party fights at the expense of directing their fire at Democrats. However, Democrats may not want to start rooting for Rubio by virtue of his backers: If he wins the nomination, Rubi could be formidable in the general election and having a young Latino governor of this still-pivotal state could pose longer-term problems. Democrats should be rooting for continued infighting and yet for Crist to hang on--which should, in turn, lead to yet more infighting.

*Thrasher, who is close to former governor Jeb Bush, is not considered a Crist ally; he backed a Crist opponent during the 2006 GOP gubernatorial primary. Greer clearly was: Crist appointed him chair.

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North Dakota: #1 With a Bullet

If I'd applied my Most Valuable Democrat methodology to the Senate rather than the House, Byron Dorgan would have been a pretty good candidate for the #1 position. Although he's not quite a rank-and-file liberal, he's more progressive than his colleague in the Senate, Kent Conrad, and way more progressive than you'd ordinarily expect of a Senator from a Prairie State, Democrat or otherwise. But today, he announced his intention to retire.

This is un-spinnably bad news for the Democrats, and North Dakota advances to the #1 position in our Senate race rankings. Perhaps this means that John Hoeven was going to challenge Dorgan for the Senate seat anyway and perhaps it doesn't. But in either case, Hoeven's entry into the Senate race would now seem likely and Democratic hopes are probably contingent upon Hoeven not running and Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota's at-large representative, so doing, a rather dicey parlay in what will likely be a bad national environment for the Democrats.

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Rassachusetts: Why a Poll May be Terribly, Horribly Wrong -- And Why Democrats Should be Worried Anyway

OK, here's that Rasmussen poll on the Massachusetts Senate special election. It shows Martha Coakley leading Scott Brown 50-41, a 9-point margin, eerily replicating the expectations of the Democratic strategist who told Dave Weigel: “I’d guess that, being Rasmussen, it’ll have a 10-point race.”

Although a 9-point margin -- or closer -- seems entirely possible to me, Rasmussen has arrived at that number in something of a strange way. It's pretty easy to back out Rasmussen's turnout demographics, and they're showing an electorate which is 21 percent Republican, 52 percent Democrat, and 27 percent other. Although there are lots of different ways to ask about party identification, typically that's not what we see in elections in the Bay State, as the number of independents is usually much higher (43 percent of Massachusetts voters were independent/other in 2008, and 51 percent are registered as independents). They're also showing an electorate that is 39 percent liberal, 34 percent conservative, and 27 percent moderate; that compares to 2008 exit poll demographics of 31 percent liberal, 19 percent conservative, and 49 percent moderate.

So Rasmussen's theory on this election, basically, is that the people in the middle won't bother to show up; there are many fewer independents and many fewer moderates in their sample than you usually get in Massachusetts. Instead, it will be a race between the bases. That could be a good theory, or it could be an artifact of their sample design -- one thing that generally seems true of Rasmussen and some of the IVR pollsters is that they capture a hyper-informed and hyper-partisan electorate. (To wit: Rasmussen shows Coakley getting just 21 percent of the "other" vote -- but 24 percent of the Republican vote.)

By the way, that's not necessarily meant to imply that Rasmussen is lowballing Coakley's number. It could be that they're low on Brown instead. Or that they have two wrongs which more or less make a right. Or that they have the race completely nailed. Or that they've completely flubbed it up.

But, if I had to set an over-under on this race, it would be above 9 points for Coakley, especially given the earlier polling. If Coakley were to hold the 58 percent she got in the Suffolk and WNEC polls, for instance, at Brown got all the undecideds, that would imply a 16-point margin of victory. Or, if you take Rasmussen's 9-point margin and add 4-5 points to it, which has been roughly the magnitude of their house effect thus far this year, that would imply a 13-14 point win.

So something in the broad range of about 15 points seems about right -- as an over-under. But it's also an over-under with an exceptionally high error margin, because special elections are so difficult to predict. A 30-point drubbing by Coakley wouldn't surprise me; nor would a race that kept us up late on Election Night.

And frankly, if I were either party and my internal polling showed a 15-point margin, I'd still be thinking about putting some money into this race. Special elections in many ways resemble presidential primaries, and polls are off in primaries by an average of about 7 points. That would imply something like a 3-5 percent chance of a Brown victory, which feels about right. But considering how consequential that 5 percent could be -- the probable collapse of health care reform -- it's something worth hedging against if you're the Democrats, or taking a flier on if you're the G.O.P.

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Wicked Awesome Thoughts on Massachusetts Special Election

Rasmussen is supposed to have a poll out tomorrow (Tuesday) on the Massachusetts Senate Special Election, which will take place on the 19th. There's been some speculation, mostly from Republican blogs but also from some Democratic analysts, that the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, might have a chance, which would potentially wreck the Democrats' chances to pass health care reform.

I'll be curious to see what Rasmussen and the other pollsters (PPP? Suffolk?) have to say, and bears remembering that special elections are highly unpredictable affairs. But I'd be somewhat surprised if the election turns out to be especially competitive. The thing is, this race has been polled a couple of times; Suffolk conducted a poll of the Coakley versus Brown matchup in November, and had Coakley ahead by 31 points. And WNEC (that's a college, not a radio station) conducted a poll of likely voters in October and had Coakley ahead by 26.

Now, Brown's name recognition has improved since then, so odds are that the final margin will be significantly closer. But in both polls, Coakley was already comfortably over 50 percent -- in fact, she was at 58 percent in both of them. So even if virtually all of the undecideds break toward Brown and the turnout is worse for Democrats than what the pollsters are anticipating, she should have a fair amount of cushion.

The WNEC poll, incidentally, found that 73 percent of Democrats considered themselves highly very likely to vote, versus 78 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of independents. Based on current party registration statistics, that would make the projected electorate 39 percent Democrat, 13 percent Republican and 48 percent independent; based on 2008 exit polling results instead, the turnout would be 45 D, 19 R and 39 indie. With demographics like that, and the fact that independents in Massachusetts tend to lean Democratic, Coakley would have to be an exceptionally poor candidate to lose the race or Brown an exceptionally strong one, and neither of those things are true.

Now, maybe the Republican enthusiasm advantage is a little bit larger than what WNEC shows. But I'm suspicious of comparisons with, for instance, Virginia; the reason the turnout swung so much there is partly because Virginia has a lot of swing voters. The turnout demographics didn't change all that much in New Jersey, on the other hand; Jon Corzine lost there because he was a crappy governor. And if New Jersey is less swingy than Virginia, Massachusetts is way less swingy than New Jersey. Also, turnout was pretty decent in the special primary, with 664,195 people voting in the Democratic race versus 162,706 in the Republican one, although the Democratic race was considerably more competitive.

But the basic problem for Brown is -- what happens if Rasmussen or whomever shows the race close and the national parties start throwing some money into the contest? Then you have Democrats playing the Teddy Card and Republicans nationalizing the race and talking about killing a bill that Kennedy fought his whole life for; that's not a winning formula in Massachusetts.

Or to put it another way: if perception has swung so much against the Democrats that they can't win a referendum on Teddy Kennedy's health care bill in Massachusetts, perhaps Brown would be doing them a favor by killing the thing.

Edit/PS. I tend to agree with the Republican bloggers to this extent -- there's more upside than downside in contesting the race, particularly if one acknowledges that the upside consists mostly of making the race close enough to win the GOP a couple of news cycles. But it's a tricky course to navigate because, unless I'm way misreading the landscape, the teabagger message won't play well there. In other words, Brown could use Michael Steele's money, but almost certainly not his message.

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Putting the [R] in [R]asmussen?

ThinkProgress has discovered, by way of a cool new invention known as The Internet, that Scott Rasmussen has in fact been conducing polling on behalf of partisan clients, in particular the RNC and the Bush re-election campaign, both during 2003-04.

This appears to contradict all but the most absurdly lawyerly readings of a statement on Rasmussen Reports' website, which reads: "Scott [Rasmussen] maintains his independence and has never been a campaign pollster or consultant for candidates seeking office." The statement was also repeated word-for-word in a Politico article without any qualification.

OK, so we'll score this The Internet 1, Politico's fact-checking department 0, and Rasmussen a negative something for posting a blatantly misleading statement on their website.

Here's an interesting question: Should organizations like Pollster.com and Real Clear Politics, each of which put an (R) or a (D) by the name of pollsters whom they consider to be "partisan affiliated", put an (R) designation by Rasmussen Reports?

Well, I can't really answer that question, because I don't know exactly how they define "partisan affiliated". Still, I think some nuance is in order. In particular, it's probably useful to distinguish between Scott Rasmussen himself and Rasmussen Reports. The polling industry is fairly incestuous; people may be partners in some firms, consultants to others, and may conduct further polling on behalf of themselves as a sole proprietorship or another entity like an S-Corp created for tax purposes. And these relationships may change over time. In this case, the polling for Bush and the RNC was conducted on behalf of "Scott Rasmussen Inc", which I'd surmise is Scott's personal business and is separate from Rasmussen Reports itself.

Does that matter? It emphatically does not excuse the statement on Rasmussen Reports' website, which is specifically applied not just to Rasmussen Reports but also to Scott Rasmussen himself. But, if RCP and Pollster were to place an (R) or a (D) by the name of any polling firm who had any partner who had ever conducted polling on behalf of partisan clients, there wouldn't be too many pollsters left who went without a partisan designation.

I suspect that the working definition that RCP and Pollster use is closer to "a firm that actively solicits polling business on behalf of clients from one party". Rasmussen Reports currently is not doing this. In fact, they state on their website that "because we value our independence and credibility, Rasmussen Reports cannot be hired to conduct a poll for anyone" (although Rasmussen Reports left the line blurrier several years ago, and I don't know if the prohibition on for-hire polling applies to Scott Rasmussen himself.)

Personally, I don't think you get very far looking at who conducted the poll -- instead, I prefer to look at who paid for it. If a "partisan" polling firm like Democracy Corps or Public Opinion Strategies issues a poll under their own name (or on behalf of a media client), I wouldn't consider that to be a partisan poll and would list it in my averages. Likewise, if a non-partisan pollster like Gallup were to issue a poll on behalf of Charlie Crist, I would consider that a partisan poll and wouldn't include it. As our FAQ states:

A poll is excluded if it was conducted by any current candidate for office, a registered campaign committee, a Political Action Committee, or a 527 group, unless (i) the poll has a bipartisan partner (partisan polling groups will sometimes pair with one another to reduce the perception of bias), or (ii) the organization has a long and demonstrable track record of releasing all its data to the public.

Polls are not excluded simply because the pollster has conducted work on behalf of Republican or Democratic candidates.

I don't want to pretend this is a perfect definition, but it does draw a fairly bright line. This applies, by the way, specifically to the polls we include in our statistical models (the 2010 model should debut sometime in late spring). I apply a bit more discretion to what polls I might choose or choose not to highlight in narrative pieces, although I think you'll find I generally apply the same principle. If the organization that paid for a poll has some skin in the game, I'll usually ignore it -- or if I do talk about it, I'll probably talk about it in a disparaging fashion.

Right now, Rasmussen Reports is branding themselves essentially as media organization. I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt here, in no small part because that's how I tend to brand FiveThirtyEight as well. I don't buy that a media organization won't, can't, or shouldn't have a "point of view"; FiveThirtyEight has a point of view, i.e. that of me and our other writers. I also don't buy that a "point of view" automatically equals "bias".

But I do believe in open disclosure, both as a branding and an ethical matter. That's why I tell you in the FAQ who I voted for (Barack Obama). I have never conducting polling or paid consulting on behalf of a political client, nor am I actively (or even passively, for the time being) soliciting such business. I have conducted consulting and polling on behalf non-political clients, and I have also advised political clients on an informal, unpaid basis. FiveThirtyEight is independently owned and operated.

Any of that could change -- in which case, we'll just have to tell you about it. As for Rasmussen, I'm not going to tell them how to run their business.

EDIT: Interestingly, Rasmussen Reports has also conducted at least one poll, in 2005, for a liberal-leaning group.

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The Skies Are as Friendly as Ever: 9/11, Al Qaeda Obscure Statistics on Airline Safety

When your favorite air carrier tells you to arrive at the airport three hours before an international flight, they're not playing around. Flying home to New York from Montreal yesterday, it took me nearly three hours to proceed from the door at Trudeau Airport to my gate. In the interim I experienced:

-- A passport and credit-card swipe at the automated check-in machine;
-- Being routed back to the check-in line after I was told that there were no carry-on bags permitted except for laptop bags and purses;
-- A 75-minute wait at said check-in line, and then a 10-minute wait to get my checked baggage scanned;
-- Being routed back yet again to the check-in counter after a traveling companion was told he couldn't carry his laptop bag on board because it didn't actually contain a laptop;
-- An ID and boarding pass check after clearing everything up and finally being allowed to proceed to the metal detectors;
-- Another ID and boarding pass check upon exiting the metal detectors and heading to customs;
-- A passport and boarding pass check by the customs agent;
-- A boarding pass scan upon leaving customs;
-- A full pat-down and hand examination of my luggage upon exiting customs and entering the departure terminal, as is apparently now given to all US-bound customers.

Fortunately my flight, which I would probably have missed had been on time, turned out to be late. Until it wasn't late any more ... it magically disappeared from the departure monitors. About $729.24 in iPhone international roaming charges later, I found out it had been canceled. A semi-helpful Delta gate agent re-routed us onto Air Canada into LaGuardia, although only after we pointed out emphatically that Delta is not the only airline and JFK is not the only NYC-area airport. The Air Canada flight was delayed, delayed again, and then canceled, after it turned out the delay had bumped the pilot out of his duty window. Then there was another delay after Air Canada searched for a big enough plane to accommodate the bumped passengers -- notwithstanding that all the cancellations had turned Montreal Trudeau International Airport into Airbus International Parking Lot. Finally, at about 9:15 -- eight hours after I'd arrived at the airport -- we were permitted to board, and a de-icing, a very bumpy landing, and a 30-minute taxi into the arrival gate later, we had made it home.

Not all of this, certainly, had to do with the security situation -- it was, rather, a veritable perfect storm of security issues, inclement weather, red tape, a notoriously disorganized airport, and a busy travel weekend. But, seeing as how it now takes almost as much time to travel home from Montreal as it does from Los Angeles, it left me wondering once again about the costs and benefits of "enhanced" airport security.

Last week, I wrote an article that detailed just how exceedingly rare terrorist incidents aboard commercial airlines are. What I didn't do is to compare the current situation to that of previous eras. Fortunately, there is quite a lot of data on this subject, particularly from the matter-of-factly named website PlaneCrashInfo.com. From their database, I compiled the number of passenger fatalities resulting in each decade from three types of incidents: sabotage (i.e. bombings), hijackings, and pilot shootings (which are much rarer than the other two types; just three in the database). Collectively, I term these Violent Passenger Incidents or VPIs; they are the things we might hope to prevent via tighter airport security.

In the 2000s, a total of 469 passengers (including crew and terrorists) were killed worldwide as the result of Violent Passenger Incidents, 265 of which were on 9/11 itself. No fatal incidents have occurred since nearly simultaneous bombings of two Russian aircraft on 8/24/2004; this makes for the longest streak without a fatal incident since World War II. The overall death toll during the 2000s is about the same as it was during the 1960s, and substantially less than in the 1970s and 1980s, when violent incidents peaked. The worst individual years were 1985, 1988 and 1989, in that order; 2001 ranks fourth.



Of course, there is a lot more air travel now than there was a couple of decades ago. Although worldwide data is difficult to obtain, U.S. air travel generally expanded at rates of 10-15% per year from the 1930s through 9/11. If we assume that U.S. air traffic represents about a third of the worldwide total (the U.S. share of global GDP, which is probably a reasonable proxy, has fairly consistently been between 26-28% during this period), we can estimate the number of deaths from Violent Passenger Incidents per one billion passenger boardings. By this measure, the 2000s tied the 1990s for being the safest on record, each of which were about six times safer than any previous decade. About 22 passengers per one billion enplanements were killed as the result of VPIs during the 2000s; this compares with a rate of about 191 deaths per billion enplanements during the 1960s.



But 9/11, of course, did not just kill people on the planes. Rather, nearly 3,000 of our citizens were murdered, the vast majority of whom were literally just going about their business in New York City or Arlington. If we include ground deaths in the total, we get a rather different picture, with the 2000s in fact being the worst decade on record.



As much as anything, however, this speaks to the tragic uniqueness of 9/11. Since the beginning of commercial air travel, a total of about 6,500 people have been killed as the result of Violent Passenger Incidents -- nearly half of those, or 2,995, came on 9/11 itself.

Without necessarily wanting to render any "predictions", it seems to me that the loss of life that occurred on the ground on 9/11 would be very hard for Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group to replicate. The reason is that the last line of defense against the terrorists has also proven to be the best, and that is the passengers. Brave passengers thwarted the hijacking attempts aboard United 93 and Qantas 173, and sabotage attempts aboard NWA 253 and AA 63 (the Shoe Bomber incident). In addition, the innovation of secure cockpit doors and increased scrutiny of suspicious persons at flight school make a literal repeat of 9/11 unlikely -- and if worse came to absolute worse, the domestic air defense system could also be scrambled.

I don't mean to be glib about the risk to the passengers on the jets themselves, but 12 out of every 13 innocent deaths on 9/11 were to people on the ground. And even if the deaths at the WTC and the Pentagon are included, the rate of deaths from Violent Passenger Incidents during the 2000s qualifies as relatively "normal", comparable to or slightly lower than the death rates in the 1940s through the 1980s. In fact, with the exception of the 1930s, when there wasn't really enough commercial air travel to provide for a sufficient sample size, and the 1990s, a decade which was a positive outlier in so many ways, the death rate from VPIs has been remarkably constant from decade to decade.



This is not necessarily meant to be interpreted as a call for laxer airport security. The mitigation of deaths from Violent Passenger Incidents can just as easily be read as a success story, of sorts -- although just as clearly some of the latest "innovations", like taking off our sneakers, or permitting passengers to carry on a bag if it contains a laptop but not if it doesn't -- are theatrical, ineffectual, and otherwise asinine.

It does seem to me, however, the singular focus on Al Qaeda is obscuring an understanding of the bigger picture. From the very dawn of commercial air travel, it was inevitable that some idiots -- whether acting alone or in concert -- might think it a bright idea to hijack or detonate passenger jets. We might not think of all such villains as "terrorists". There are a number of stories from the 1950s and the 1960s, believe it or not, of people blowing up commercial jets to collect life insurance. These people were profoundly evil, but would meet no reasonable definition of terrorism.

Fortunately, they have been exceedingly very few in number. They are arguably becoming rarer rather than more common -- and they are arguably becoming easier to detect. Airline security inherently involves trade-offs, and one is not likely to win very many arguments in Washington complaining about inconvenienced travelers, or reduced tourism to Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. But let's at least analyze these trade-offs rationally, and not let the terrorists terrorize us any more than we must.

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Healthcare Spending and Life Expectancy

Youall know about this already, but I wanted to post this plot of health-care expenditure and life expectancy (click on the graph to see a larger version):



A somewhat misleading (in my opinion) presentation of these numbers has been floating around on the web recently, and so I wanted to post this cleaner graph. (The area of the circle for each country is proportional to the number of doctor visits per person; I don't know that this information is so crucial but I included it, as it was on the original graph that I've modified.)

See here for background.

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Is Rasmussen Reports Biased?

There's a big, slow-news-weekend story over at Politico today over allegations made by certain Democrats and liberals that the prolific polling firm Rasmussen Reports is biased toward conservative and Republican causes. I have to catch a flight (weather permitting) in a couple of hours, so I don't have quite as much time to weigh in on this as I'd like, but let me present the Cliff's Notes version.

The first thing to note is that there are a lot of different ways in which a polling firm might be biased. Rasmussen is most frequently accused of bias because their results are thought to lean toward Republican candidates. Just to pick a random example, for instance, Rasmussen has embattled Democrat Blanche Lincoln down by margins ranging between 4 and 7 points against three potential Republican opponents in her 2010 Senate race, whereas two other polling firms (neither of which, incidentally, are themselves free of partisan ties) have Lincoln ahead against these opponents by margins ranging from 1 to 16 points. Does this mean that Rasmussen is biased?

For me, it doesn't -- not necessarily. It means that Rasmussen has a different model of what the 2010 election is going to look like, one which will feature a more conservative electorate. But that model isn't necessarily wrong, nor does it necessarily reflect bias. The polling firm Public Policy Polling has also tended to show poor results for Democratic candidates in its 2010 polling, relative to other pollsters like Quinnipiac. But Public Policy Polling is a Democratic polling firm. Are they biased too?

What Rasmussen has had is a "house effect". So far in the 2010 cycle, their polling has consistently and predictably shown better results for Republican candidates than other polling firms have. But such house effects can emerge from legitimate differences of opinion about how to model the electorate. And ultimately, these differences of opinion will be tested -- based on what happens next November. If Rasmussen's opinion turns out to be wildly inaccurate, that will impeach their credibility, and believe me, we will point that out. Likewise, if they turn out to be right when most other pollsters are wrong, we will point that out too.

Rasmussen's election polling has tended to be quite accurate in the past. Nor, incidentally, has their election polling has a particularly strong house effect in the past; it is something new to the 2010 cycle. But that's OK; each election cycle features different dynamics in terms of turnout and motivation, and what might be smart assumptions in one cycle won't necessarily carry over to the next.

Now, what you do need to be aware of is that Rasmussen's opinion is one among many. They might turn out to be right -- but so might all of the other pollsters who have a different opinion about the electorate. If you're running a news organization and you tend to cite Rasmussen's polls disproportionately, it probably means that you are biased -- it does not necessarily mean that Rasmussen is biased.

* * *

But there are other respects in which I'm much less sympathetic to Rasmussen's case. In particular, this has to do with their choices of question wording and subject matter. The Politico question, for instance, points toward an August question in which Rasmussen asked "It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.” That is not a question designed to elicit the most accurate reflection of public opinion.

Likewise, Rasmussen recently produced a poll in which they purported to describe the Democratic health care plan to their respondents. Several other pollsters have found that support for the plan increases when it is actually described to respondents, but Rasmussen showed no such increase. However, the second sentence in their description reads:

The plans before Congress would prohibit people from choosing insurance plans with lower premiums and higher deductibles.

I don't particularly know where this comes from; Rasmussen claims that its questions came from a 'summary of the legislation provided by the New York Times', but such a depiction of the health care policy appears nowhere in the New York Times article. But there it is in the Rasmussen survey, where it appears to be designed to build a relationship in the respondent's mind between the Democratic plan and higher premiums.

I'm not saying that Rasmussen's question wording is always biased. It isn't. And I'm sure you could find a couple of cases where the wording tend to portray the liberal argument more favorably. But cases like these happen consistently enough with Rasmussen that I'd say it's a concern. And when they do use unorthodox question wording, nine times out of ten it favors the conservative argument. I would describe this as a form of bias -- although it should generally implicate only the poll in question, and not their overall enterprise. In other words, if Rasmussen uses some misleading wording in a health care poll, that means I'm not likely to take that health care poll very seriously -- but it doesn't particularly mean that you should throw out their presidential approval polling, or their Arkansas polling, or their polling on gay marriage, or whatever. Yes, this does mean a bit of extra work -- we have to scrutinize each particular poll for potentially misleading wording -- but that's something that we should be doing more of anyway.

I also have some questions about Rasmussen's choice of subject matter. In particular, they have a knack for issuing polls at times which tend to dovetail with conservative media narratives. Rasmussen, for instance, recently decided to issue a poll about Ben Nelson's standing in Nebraska in light of his vote for health care, which is unpopular in the state. But did they issue a similar poll for Joe Lieberman, who until recently looked like he might vote against the health care bill -- and who opposed the public option, a policy which is very popular in Connecticut? No. They did poll Connecticut in December, but they asked only about Chris Dodd, and not Lieberman. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with polling on Ben Nelson -- or with not polling on Joe Lieberman, who gets polled frequently by home-state pollster Quinnipiac. But if you see this sort of pattern consistently, then it may reflect a certain kind of bias.

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