Now, PPP has shown Santorum to be the Republican candidate that voters like the most in MN and OH, but that doesn't translate to voter support in those States in match-ups. And Santorum's favourables are the best of a dismal group, but they are still awful. PPP set his favourables in OH at a negative 35/48, while the supposedly "hated" Obama is at 48/48.
In a potential Election 2012 matchup, President Obama attracts 47% of the vote and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney earns 43%. These matchup results are updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.
Matchups for other Republican contenders are updated weekly on a rotating basis. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is at 45% while President Obama earns 44%. This is the first time Santorum has ever led the president in any poll.
Rasmussen can publish results like this because it's virtually impossible for Santorum to win the nomination. While he technically won IA, that is a non-binding caucus. The IA Republican Party will decide who gets the delegates, not the voters. Santorum has a tiny two-point lead in the most recent polling for the MN Republican caucus, but that race is also non-binding. In 2008, Romney won 41% of the caucus vote in MN, with McCain at 22%. That didn't matter, because the the State Party gave all of the delegates to McCain and counted all of the Ron Paul delegates' votes as abstentions. In these non-binding caucuses, the delegates go to the candidate that the Party elders believe has the best chance of winning, not the candidate that the rank-and-file prefer. And in the NV caucus, Santorum came in fourth out of four.
Rasmussen's one-point lead for Santorum is a joke, because that's well within the margin of error. At one point, Rasmussen also had Bachmann leading Obama by two points - and we all know how that worked out.
While Rasmussen has been polling the Republican caucuses, they have yet to do any of the State polling that PPP has done multiple times in a large number of States. Rasmussen, it might seem, doesn't want to establish a baseline that might create contradictions as we approach the election. Instead, they do these "tracking polls" that shift constantly, allowing those on the Right and in the media to have supporting "evidence" for any narrative they might choose. Any candidate's partisans can find a Rasmussen tracking poll that shows their man is the one to beat Obama.
By sitting out the State polling, Rasmussen deprives wingnuts of the delusional ammunition they need to counter PPP's massive pile of data. Instead, conservatives can only point to an alleged Democratic bias in PPP's numbers and reject it out of hand.
It's really hard for Rasmussen to claim that "it's too early" to poll the States, when Rasmussen has been using a "likely voter" screen for more than two years already in their polling. Apparently, it's too early to attempt to find out who leads in which State, but it's long overdue to "know" who will vote in those elections. It's like a weather forecaster saying that they can't tell you what the temperature will be on a certain day eight months from now, but they can be very sure that it will rain.
I'm always suspicious of Rasmussen and his motives. This is the pollster who single-handedly created the myth of the "PUMA" out of whole cloth from his polling, and who pushed the narrative for months until silently abandoning it as we moved into his self-imposed "40-day window" for accuracy. Yes, it's another one of Rasmussen's convenient "things changed" moments.
Rasmussen wants to be taken seriously as a pollster far outside of his "40-day window", but in every election he basically tells us to ignore everything he said outside of that window once we are in it.
By showing Obama ahead on many of these tracking polls, Rasmussen can hedge his bets and point to results later that either support an Obama lead or support a Republican lead. And we can be sure that there will be some minor event within 40 days of the election that Rasmussen designates as his "things changed" moment, and all of his previous polling will be invalidated by this "new development".
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