The real loser of the election

[Iosif]

Pussied out of polling competitive primaries and was spectacularly off in a lot of his general election polling.

At least he's got his book career to fall back on.

[I left.]

I know about Hawaii.....but where was his polling so far off? I really can't think of much.

[Mr. Morden]

He was off on the "national House ballot" by more than anyone except Gallup.  He had a systematic bias towards the GOP of a couple of points in most of the individual races.  Of course, if you subtract off that "house effect", the polling isn't bad (except in Hawaii).

[N.i.K.]

Scott Rasmussen did say about a week or two before the election that he expects a net GOP gain of 55, which they accomplished. His generic ballot was ridiculous, though.

Otherwise, especially for Nevada, his polls were definitely off. But he did well in Florida, I must admit.

[Lief]

Rasmussen had an average error of nearly six points (more than all the other large polling firms) and a clear systematic Republican bias of nearly four points. Except for Gallup and its ridiculous generic ballot numbers, Rasmussen was probably the worst pollster of the cycle (not counting random uni polls): http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/

[Vasall des Midas]

Add that the FOX/Pulse polls were actually marginally better than the officially Rasmussen polls.

[JulioMadrid]

And the winner is... PPP!!!!

[crypto-fascist superhero]

Rasmussen was not out of range of the other pollsters in Nevada, so that's a pretty poor example.  They were the best pollster in Kentucky and especially Florida, where they nailed both races.

[Beet]

Even more interesting in the long term, according to Nate's chart an Internet poll that does not even do random sampling but just asks pre-selected people the survey questions and then weights by relevant party ID and demographic factors did about as well as the non Internet polls.

[Lief]

lol scott...

Asked about Silver's assessment, Scott Rasmussen told Salon today that "I don't respond to comments from bloggers or others." And he said he was on the whole proud of his midterm predictions.

"We showed the generic ballot numbers predicting a significant victory for Republicans all through 2010, and that worked out as we expected," Rasmussen said. Noting polls the firm did on Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he added: "We were the first to pick up the power of what later became the Tea Party movement."

He said he did not specifically remember the Hawaii poll showing Inouye ahead by just 13 points. "I'll have to go back and look at that one," Rasmussen said.

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/11/03/scott_rasmussen_polls_inaccurate

[SvenssonRS]

I love how liberals make it a career out of waging nuclear war against Rasmussen. Come on, people, he's not Zogby.

[crypto-fascist superhero]

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/11/03/scott_rasmussen_polls_inaccurate

The comments on that are hilarious.

[Californian Tony]

And you know what's the worse ? Rasmussen's polls made up 37% of 538.com's database, thus they caused their projections to be far off in some States... and this led me to miss many of my Atlas predictions ! This clown will make me have a poor score...