“Coming off a bare-knuckles debate this week, Democrat Jerry Brown hits his highest level of support to date in his race against Republican Meg Whitman to be the next governor of California,” the Rasmussan poll reports.
This is significant considering Rasmussan is accussed of right-leaning bias.
“The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the state finds Brown with 50% of the vote to Whitman’s 44%. Two percent (2%) like some other candidate in the race, and four percent (4%) are undecided.”
The details are here.
Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report 
Two of my favorite musicians, Johnny and Willie.
The highwaymen are one short these days but Willie played at the Greek last month and Kris played Grass Valley this summer, thanks Julie for bringing him.
Evidence, please, that Rasmussen has ever put an ideological thumb on their polling scales.
An absence of left wing bias is not the moral equivalent of a right wing bias.
http://dailyhurricane.com/2010/06/will-rasmussens-right-wing-bias-hurt-republicans-this-year.html
Greg,
I’m already regretting removing you from “moderated” comments.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/01/04/rasmussens-polling-stirs-bias-debate/
http://dailyhurricane.com/2010/06/will-rasmussens-right-wing-bias-hurt-republicans-this-year.html
http://www.westerncpac.com/agenda
Apparently, I’m not here to curry your favor, Jeff, and pointing out op/ed’s and blogs calling Rasmussen biased is not the same as demonstrating this. Pew and Rasmussen were both pretty damned close to each other calling ’08 for Obama, and both had it much closr than the Obama cheerleadering polls that really were biased.
Yes, Rasmussen is aligned with conservatives. So? Pew is aligned with left-liberals yet they’re seemingly just as interested in getting the numbers right.
It appears to me that until Rasmussen’s ‘likely voter’ model actually is shown to fail at an election time, we’re left with his past successes, whether it favored a Republican or a Democrat. In just weeks we’ll know how far off he was this time.
I’m glad to seem I’m on the same page as Calbuzz, since I used to work with Jerry Roberts at The Chronicle. Greg, I was thinking about charging you to post here. Maybe a buck or two a word to help get our son through college. LOL.
At Free, you’ve just about priced yourself out of the market already. I’d suggest Sierra College and Chico State as alternate plans.
This from Calbuzz:
“Don’t Call Us: When a Rasmussen Poll says Jerry Brown is leading Meg Whitman 50-44%, including 53-41% among women (after the “whore” story fallout) and 76-23% among non-whites and non-blacks (mostly Latinos with a few Asians), you know the ground is shifting in Brown’s direction.
Part of the explanation is that Rasmussen is fiddling with his turnout model – moving from a 2-point spread of Democrats over Republicans to a 6-point spread (could be he wants his survey to look more “scientific” and less partisan). But because the Rasmussen survey is automated, and it’s illegal to automatically dial cell phones, his surveys are fatally flawed – against Democrats.
A new study by the Pew Research Center underscores the distaste Calbuzz has regularly expressed for automatic, robotic calling, web-based polling and other shoddy political surveys. Pew found that surveys that do not include cell phones, “including virtually all of the automated polls” (like Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) yield a bias for Republicans and against Democrats on the order of 4 to 6 percentage points.
California pollsters (like the Field Poll, USC/LA Times and most private pollsters) who use the Secretary of State’s official list of voters as a base for their surveys automatically avert this source of potential error because they call respondents at whatever phone number they used when registering to vote. Other credible pollsters (like PPIC) use random digit dialing but include a representative sample of cell phones.
Here’s what Pew reported:
The latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many — including virtually all of the automated polls — do not include interviews with people on their cell phones. (For more on the impact of the growing cell-only population on survey research, see “Assessing the Cell Phone Challenge,” May 20, 2010).
In the Pew Research Center’s latest poll, conducted Aug. 25 to Sept. 6 among 2,816 registered voters, including 786 reached by cell phone, 44% said that if the election were held today that they would vote for the Republican candidate for Congress in their district or leaned Republican, while 47% would vote for the Democratic candidate or leaned Democratic. Among the landline respondents, 46% preferred the GOP candidate and 45% the Democratic candidate, a four-point shift in the margin.”
Well, Steve, I’d guess if you think the Rasmussen likely voter model is bunk, and the random sampling of registered voters is a better indication of voting intent, then this Pew poll is good news to you. Most seem to think R’s will be picking up a large number of Congressional seats.