Not bad news for Newt in any serious way. The average probably is a better measure.
Most important:
Rasmussen has not revealed, or it has not been made public, how he is weighting his sampling of Iowa caucus goers.
In a national poll against a democratic opponent, we are told how many democrats and how many republicans went into the result. We would know the books were cooked if a poll had 800 democrats and 200 republicans.
We are not told how many conservative, moderate, and liberal republicans go into Rasmussen’s numbers.
Since Iowa has been controlled by a very large group of conservative Christians for a number of cycles now, they should be the lion’s share of the sample.
We are not told.