The
Center for Public Integrity listed "Scott Rasmussen Inc" as a
paid consultant for the 2004
George W. Bush campaign.
[96] The Washington Post reported that
the 2004 Bush re-election campaign had used a feature on the Rasmussen Reports website that allowed customers to program their own polls, and that Rasmussen asserted that he had not written any of the questions nor assisted Republicans.
[97]
In 2009
Time magazine described Rasmussen Reports as a "conservative-leaning polling group".
[98] John Zogby said in 2010 that Scott Rasmussen had a "conservative constituency".
[99] In 2012
The Washington Post called Rasmussen a "polarizing pollster".
[100]
Rasmussen has received criticism over the wording in its polls.
[101][102] Asking a polling question with different wording can affect the results of the poll;
[103] the commentators in question allege that the questions Rasmussen ask in polls are skewed in order to favor a specific response. For instance, when Rasmussen polled whether Republican voters thought
Rush Limbaugh was the leader of their party, the specific question they asked was: "Agree or Disagree: 'Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party—he says jump and they say how high.'"
[102]
Talking Points Memo has questioned the methodology of Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index, which takes into account only those who "strongly" approve or disapprove of the President's job performance.
TPM noted that this inherently skews negative, and reported that multiple polling experts were critical of the concept.
[52] A
New York Times article says Rasmussen Reports research has a "record of relying on dubious sampling and weighting techniques".
[104] Rasmussen has also been criticized for only polling Likely Voters which, according to Politico, "potentially weeds out younger and minority voters".
[105]
A 2017 article by
Chris Cillizza for
CNN raised doubts about Rasmussen's accuracy, drawing attention specifically to potential
sampling biases such as the exclusion of calls to cell phones (which, Cillizza argued, tended to exclude younger voters), and also more generally to a lack of methodological disclosure. Cillizza did, however, note in the same piece that Rasmussen was one of the more accurate polling organizations during the
2016 United States presidential election.
[106]
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.
[107]
The
Associated Press has also addressed Rasmussen's methodology. In 2018, AP journalists noted that Rasmussen's telephone methodology systematically omits adults, many of them young people, without landlines. The AP also noted that Rasmussen does not provide details regarding its online-panel methodology.
[108]
In an article for
The Hill titled "Rasmussen Research has a pro-GOP bias", panelist discussed Rasmussen's practice of adjusting results by party identification. In addition to providing professional criticism from
Ipsos, the article cited methodological concerns from Frank Newport of
Gallup.
[2]