Correct me if I'm wrong...but isn't Scott Rasmussen the founder of ESPN?
I also believe he is a Republican (calls himself and independent). Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh all tout Rasmussen as being a fair pollster (unlike the bias you get with Zogby who leans heavily and proudly Democrat).
Rasmussen may be playing a different game. With a 10 point Bush lead what is the likely direction it can go? Up? hardly...Down? You bet. So he is keeping it modest and any movement will be seen as upward movement and not downward movement.
Who's to say pollsters don't already have their desired polling numbers for each week of the election...Imagine if Rasmussen planned to release numbers like this
Week 1 Sept Bush up 2
Week 2 Sept Bush up 2
Week 3 Sept Bush up 3
Week 3 Sept Bush up 3
Week 1 Oct Bush up 3
Week 2 Oct Bush up 4
Week 3 Oct Bush up 5
Week 4 Oct Bush up 6
You get bandwagon voteres to vote for your guy all the while not falling out of the other polling outfits numbers in a drastic way.
Make sense?
Yes.. It makes perfect sense with my theory that he is manipulating the numbers.
No. You're quite wrong. Rasmussen is not a Republican. He is non-partisan. I believe that after publishing a few Republican-leaning polls, and getting scads of attention from folks like Limbaugh, he began publishing what his audience, Republicans and Freepers, wanted to hear. He was a little nobody who found himself getting millions of snoopers, until he was shown to be dead wrong. Then he lost his ties to conservatives. His track record is lousy, and no-one would pay any attention for him, other then his automation gets results first.
Zogby is not a Democrat, either. He got big by doing polls for the New York Post, once it was taken over by the same company that runs Fox News. In 1993 and 1994, he was very influential in bringing Republicans to power in New Jersey and New York, such as Whitman, Pataki, and Giuliani, by publishing polls which showed those races as rapidly tightening. In fact, Murdoch was pushing Zogby's polls so hard, he cut the price of the POst in half, and then offered it free.
Then Zogby went national with Fox News, who dropped him.
Zogby always used innovative formulae for predicting races. And that's what his pools always were: poll-based predictions, not polls.
Stick to the pros: Gallup's surveys of REGISTERED voters. (Even Gallup has started corrupting their polls with prediction methods, hence, Gallup's "likely voters" polls. These polls are ridiculous. If you announce that Bush is up by 6 among likely voters, and down three among RVs, and liekly voters are 90% of your survey, what percentage does he get among the registered-but-not-likely voters? 10%? Fortunately, Gallup has money to spend, and does its best work in pre-sampling to make sure that its raw (RV) polls are excellent.)