Rasmussen Reports

[16] For surveys such as its daily Presidential Tracking Poll, Rasmussen's automated technology calls randomly selected phone numbers, ensuring geographic representation.

[17][18] To reach those who have abandoned landlines, Rasmussen has utilized online survey tool interviews with randomly selected participants from a demographically diverse panel.

[22] Rasmussen Reports conducts a daily Presidential Tracking Poll which measures the president's job approval rating.

Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com notes that, "Rasmussen's Obama job approval ratings do tend to be lower than most other polls, but they are not the lowest.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Scott Rasmussen, along with President Clinton's pollster, Douglas Schoen, said, "Polling data show that Mr. Obama's approval rating is dropping and is below where George W. Bush was in an analogous period in 2001.

[34][35] In 2009, Rasmussen Reports produced the first poll that showed Democrats trailing on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the 2010 midterm elections.

In 2007, Tony Snow, White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, attacked a Rasmussen poll that showed only 19% of Americans believed the Iraq War troop surge of 2007 was a success.

[44] In January 2013, a Rasmussen Reports poll found record low levels of support for the Tea Party movement.

[13] The Portrait of America prediction for the 2000 presidential election was off by 4.5%,[46] compared to the average 1.1% margin of error most other national polls gave at the time.

[48] Rasmussen projected the 2004 presidential results within one percentage point of the actual vote totals earned by both George W. Bush and John Kerry.

[49] According to Politico, "Rasmussen's final poll of the 2008 general election—showing Obama defeating Arizona Sen. John McCain 52 percent to 46 percent—closely mirrored the election's outcome.

[54][55][56] The final Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll showed Mitt Romney with a 49–48% lead over President Obama.

Rasmussen Reports predicted Obama winning Nevada and New Hampshire, tying Romney in Ohio and Wisconsin, and losing in the other five swing states, including North Carolina.

Obama won in the swing states of Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia, while Romney took North Carolina.

[60] After the election, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Some conservative media outlets used the Rasmussen polling to prop up a narrative in the final days of the campaign that Romney had momentum and a good chance of winning the White House.

"[63] Rasmussen Reports’ final White House Watch survey showed Democrat Hillary Clinton with a 1.7% popular-vote lead over Republican Donald Trump.

[70][71] For the 2024 United States presidential election, Rasmussen Reports' final national poll put Trump with a 3-point lead over Kamala Harris,[72] despite most pollsters predicting a tight race.

[74][75] In the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial race, Rasmussen Reports' final poll predicted that Chris Christie would beat Jon Corzine by a margin of 3 points.

[76] In December 2009, Alan Abramowitz wrote that if Rasmussen's data was accurate, Republicans would gain 62 seats in the House during the 2010 midterm elections.

[79] In 2010, Rasmussen Reports was the first to show Republican Scott Brown had a chance to defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Just after Brown's upset win, Ben Smith at Politico reported, "The overwhelming conventional wisdom in both parties until a Rasmussen poll showed the race in single digits in early January was that Martha Coakley was a lock.

)"[80] A study by Boston University and the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism about how the Massachusetts Senate race was covered in the media concluded that "a Rasmussen Report's [sic] poll that showed the overwhelming Republican underdog, Scott Brown, climbing to within single digits (nine points) of Martha Coakley.

"[81] The New York Times Magazine opened a March 14 cover story with a scene highlighting the impact of that poll in an internal White House meeting involving President Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

[83] According to Nate Silver's assessment of 2010 pollster accuracy, the 105 polls released in senatorial and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen/Pulse Opinion Research missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points.

Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports’ lead pollster, said on Steve Bannon's show that the poll suggested election "irregularities and cheating".

[87] Founder Scott Rasmussen is the author of the book In Search of Self-Governance[88] and was a featured guest on a cruise by the conservative media outlet National Review.

Some poll watchers, including Patrick Caddell, have lauded Rasmussen Reports, while others, such as Chris Cillizza, have questioned its accuracy.

[95] He went on to explore other factors that may have explained the effect, such as the use of a likely voter model,[97] and said that Rasmussen conducted its polls in a way that excluded the majority of the population from answering.

[117] A December 2018 article by political writer and analyst Harry Enten called Rasmussen the least accurate pollster in the 2018 midterm elections after stating Rasmussen had projected the Republicans to come ahead nationally by one point, while at the time Democrats were actually winning the national House vote by 8.6 points—an error of nearly 10 points.

[120] In 2024, American Muckrakers alleged that Rasmussen shared polling results with members of the Trump presidential campaign before public release.