By now, several thoughtful observers – including Ed Morrissey, Karl at the Green Room, and William Kristol – have responded to a Politico front-page story describing a leftwing attack on pollster Scott Rasmussen. Their replies have explored familiar “shoot the messenger”/”sour grapes” rhetorical territory, have pointed to Rasmussen’s excellent record, and have revealed little inclination to give up on Rasmussen polls just because they’ve lately seemed both to favor and to be marginally helpful to the conservative side. The shared sentiment, if not the shared geographical reality, was summed up by Kristol: “[S]erious people in Washington pay attention to Rasmussen’s polls.”
The most charitable intellectual assumption about the attack is that Daily Kos, Media Matters, and other usual suspects on the left are seeing their political numbers worsen, and, fearing the other side’s momentum, have been feigning ignorance about the differences between Rasmussen’s likely voter-based, sample-controlled models and the models used by other pollsters. Given those differences, it would truly be remarkable if Rasmussen polls didn’t yield consistently different results. Perhaps aware of this fact, and having in the past spoken favorably of Rasmussen’s work, respected leftwing poll-analyst Nate Silver declines to join the frontal assault, and instead argues for a subtle distinction (bold face and italics in the original):
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.
Silver may be closer to a useful truth on this otherwise rather trivial topic, but his use of the word “bias,” it seems to me, either misses the point or simply reflects his own predispositions.
To criticize Rasmussen’s polls as somehow unrepresentative is senseless. They represent what they purport to represent, nothing more and nothing less. Likewise, neither Rasmussen’s nor other respectable pollsters’ approaches are intrinsically ideological – polling results are statistics, not arguments. They do, however, correspond to ideological positions. In this sense, what the leftists are really taking issue with isn’t Rasmussen or even his influence, but rather a mode of self-governance – contemporary American electoral democracy – that his polls successfully reflect in concept, and therefore in their results.
If there is any meaning left in the names we give our two political parties, it may be in the way each embraces one of two broadly complementary perspectives – egalitarian democracy and civic republicanism. In this sense, Rasmussen does do “conservative republican” polls – polls whose design very roughly approximates a conservative view of small-r republican governance – while Gallup and many of the media-sponsored polls of “all adults” or “all registered voters” or “whoever happens to pick up the phone” roughly qualify as “liberal democratic.”
Expansion of the franchise has, after all, long been a liberal and progressive cause. Those on the liberal left who haven’t yet gotten around to seeking the vote for non-citizen residents, felons, and other excluded groups – with longer term designs on representation for animals, plants, artificial intelligences, and the dead (where not already effectively enfranchised) – often believe that a lack of interest or knowledge among voters generally coincides with lack of privilege, and that the only way that underprivileged or alienated sectors of society can gain “fair” representation is to increase their relative turnout. It’s hardly an accident in our own day that the main voter registration and encouragement organizations like ACORN and Rock the Vote are left-liberal through and through, and sooner or later drop all pretenses of non-partisanship.
A further underlying assumption on the liberal left (at least among those who for ideologicall or tactical reasons haven’t rejected “bourgeois democracy”) is that, if low interest voters were more motivated, they would vote like higher interest representatives of their demographic blocs. In theory, it’s the evil of our current system that these voters don’t recognize a greater stake in elections. Once they did so, they would inform themselves adequately – and naturally recognize their greater affinity to the political left. Indeed, from this perspective, those voters don’t really need to be informed at all except as to the left’s endorsements, since leading leftist intellectuals are always happy to do all of the necessary thinking on any matter. Furthermore, even and especially between elections, a typical leftist view of the American polity is that, regardless of who actually shows up to vote, the opinions of all Americans, regardless of level of engagement or interest, should be taken into account equally.
The underlying conservative view, on the other hand, is that, as any parent knows, handing something precious to someone who doesn’t care about or understand it is often a good way to lose or destroy it. Many conservatives have been and would remain open to stricter voter standards and controls – stronger proofs of identity and residency, demonstrated understanding of the American system of government, fluency in English, respect for the laws, etc. – though without going back to property requirements or taking up more radical, conservative utopian proposals.
Our friends on the left will call this perspective paternalistic, with some justification, but conservatives don’t recognize any obligation to reject a position merely because it doesn’t suit a leftist preconception. Conservatives will also point out that truly paternalistic governments have often presided over near-100% turnouts in elections that merely demonstrate and ratify state power alongside the complete absence of political freedom. Even more fundamentally, the conservative view on our national life does not equate it with whoever happens to be in government or what the government does or doesn’t do – but that’s another subject.
For now, conservatives remain more comfortable with a self-selecting electorate, already a fairly “liberal” position in historical terms. The respondents to Rasmussen’s polls of identified likely voters are effectively self-selecting, just like actual voters – that’s the idea. Until and unless the country chooses a way to run its affairs that is more progressive in the way that Daily Kos and Media Matters and possibly Nate Silver typically use the term – by embracing mandated mass participation, for instance – we can say that Rasmussen’s methodological bias is conservative in relation to real existing republican democracy in America. And more power to him, conservatives will add. As to the left: Rasmussen is not your problem; Americanism is.
Comments 22
They seem to pick up more on a demographic less influenced by what Emmett Tyrell called the ‘kultursmog” and we jolly well can’t have that, say a group actually familiar with Obama’s record such
as there was one, in the State Senate and the US Senate
January 4th, 2010 at 12:25 pm
@ narciso:
You’re obviously some kind of agent in the employ of the Tyrell Corporation.
I dare not even put a name to what I suspect you to be.
January 4th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Liberals/progressives just want to control people. They think the electorate in general is stupid and needs to be controlled. They tend to see the earth has unable to sustain current levels of population and their accompanying consumption and feel the ability to travel, own large homes, and consume in excess must be left to the few smart ones. They love Cap n Trade because of that. They are in effect, anti-human. I even tricked a family member of mine into spilling the beans on that one – great fun.
As to voting privileges – how about if your net taxes (payments vs. credits) are negative, then you cannot vote. That is the only way to properly cost in the housing subsidy, the EIC, and the other middle class entitlements that threaten to bankrupt us.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
All this begs the question of what the pollsters’ polls are FOR — an issue that may have been treated in one of the linked posts, which I don’t have time to read right now.
If you are polling to predict how voters are going to vote, you want to poll likely voters.
If that’s not your purpose for polling, it’s a legitimate question what IS. If you just want to find out how people in general are feeling about things — well, that’s interesting, but political perspectives enter immediately into the determination of how actionable it is.
I’m reminded of a counterargument often made, even by conservatives, to my point that virtually all national telephone polls are inherently biased toward blue urban areas by the unequal distribution of area codes. “But,” say others, “the polls are PREDICTIVE.”
Well, actually, they’re not all predictive. The vast majority of them are never even tested by a ballot-box outcome. The ones that are — with the exception of exit polls — have a track record of generally being more predictive than not.
The reason for that is that polls that are designed to predict voting outcomes must be successful, if the pollster is to get work again. But a very large number of polls do NOT face that ballot-box test. They merely capture expressions of sentiment from a polling audience on a particular day. Those polls need not be taken with the same care, and attention to predictive success, because they will not be directly tested by actual voting outcomes.
People can have a lot of reasons for taking polls. But it’s essential to know what the purpose of a particular poll is. The ones that get tested are the ones that are subject to invalidation by an actual election — and those are the ones taken with the most careful and focused methodology. Rasmussen’s focus on likely voters keeps him tethered more closely than polls of the general population to validation or invalidation by a concrete outcome.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
@ JEM:
Great idea.
No Representation without Taxation.
It’s an idea sweeping the eighteenth century!!
January 4th, 2010 at 1:50 pm
@ fuster:
Given the modern state socialist tendencies, I figure if only the people funding the spending get a say, it might change some behavior on capital hill. Right now all democrats and I think a majority of the GOP are spending the purse to buy votes. Allowing the majority to rob the treasury. I think my proposal would be embraced by the Founders actually, since many states at that time had certain financial requirements to vote. Why should the leech get to decide how much more money of mine he can take?
January 5th, 2010 at 7:33 am
@ JEM:
Of course the alternative is to say the state cannot spend on all this stuff. Lets just declare SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, SHIP, all unconstitutional. Then it doesn’t matter. But that would assume we have grownups in DC, and we most assuredly do not.
January 5th, 2010 at 7:35 am
@ JEM:
Good thinking.
And we can sell the poor whenever we need to raise some cash.
Easily enacted, and very helpful to the Saudis.
Under a Blondes for Oil program, they could fill the Empty Quarter.
They might even purchase a battalion of boys, who, when they age and are no longer useful in the house, can be sent to hold the border with Yemen.
Yes, there’s much of merit here.
January 5th, 2010 at 8:28 am
@ JEM:
I don’t think we need or are likely to get any meaningful alteration in voting requirements short of a national unraveling. It could be that what we need, but are unlikely to get until and unless a durable sense of crisis has deepened, is a significant bloc in congress determined to break down the administrative state and permanent government, even though it would entail the long-term reduction of congressional power in material and relative terms, and have to be fought out against deeply entrenched interests both inside and outside of government. The most we can reasonably hope for is to prep the battlespace ahead of 2012 and some eventual Big Crunch.
In the wake of the ’72 landslide Nixon had prepared such a project, a direct assault on congressional prerogatives, begun with terrific expressed and latent popular support, but virtually without institutional support in the congress, the bureaucracy, the media, the party, or even among conservatives who might have liked the idea but were never brought in on it. We saw how that worked out.
January 5th, 2010 at 9:33 am
fuster wrote:
Actually I was looking at selling old posts from contrarian contention posters, or perhaps the posters themselves. How much could we get for you?
January 5th, 2010 at 11:15 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Oh – it wasn’t a serious proposal, just a warm thought. The type of majorities that would be required to actually get such a condition in place would in all likelihood mitigate the need for such measures in the first place.
Then people who have their hand out to me after they made a bunch of really stupid decisions which landed them in trouble would get my help with some serious conditions built in. Without it, it becomes just a crutch. Just look what Bush’s expansion of food stamps has done.
January 5th, 2010 at 11:19 am
@ JEM:
Read some O. Henry instead.
January 5th, 2010 at 11:23 am
JEM wrote:
and stop reading Dickens. you seem not to understand it much.
January 5th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows. So you feel unlimited handouts with no responsibilities being placed on the recipient is fine? Interesting.
January 5th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
JEM wrote:
A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every December twenty-fifth!
January 5th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Nah – Scrooge was the progressives idol, the forefathers of todays modern democrats. He wanted the riff raff to just die off. Where Dickens actually fell is unbeknownst to me.
January 5th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
@ JEM:
From the dinner table, at his home, Gadshill, in Kent.
They taught us this in the workhouse where me and me nine sisters was.
You might enjoy this bit of legislation.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Lpoor1834.htm
Dickens did not.
January 5th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
That sounds like something Wilson would have admired!
January 6th, 2010 at 6:14 am
@ fuster:
Sounds like a fine and caring law to me. But look what it has led to.
January 6th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
@ sully:
But encouraging famine and death, as the British did in Ireland, has also yielded poor results and led to a savage decline in many fine neighborhoods in the Bronx and in Boston.
Some people were so uncaring as to scatter themselves about, rather than suffer and die as the good English Lords desired.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:16 pm
JEM wrote:
If you are making reference to our late and somewhat-lamented president, please be advised that Wilson was merely his middle name.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
@ fuster:
Ineluctable, Even if you give the poor. . . some more,
It’s ineluctable, you’ll get the dickens from a wordy bore,
It’s ineluctable, you’ll still be called a sour scrooge, um,
It’s ineluctable, and be haunted all night, by a boojum
Ineluctable, In less time than you can take notes,
It’s ineluctable, politicians will be buying votes,
It’s ineluctable, and any that cut the dole will be, Unelectable,
Unelectable, you just wait and see. . .Unelectable,
It’s ineluctable.
January 6th, 2010 at 4:54 pm
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