Ras Trax 3/3: meaningless numbers from Rasmussen

For those of you keeping up with the farce known as Rasmussen's daily tracker, you remember that six days ago both Romney and Ron Paul were ahead of Obama by two points. Mysteriously, Ron Paul dropped out of 'contention' after that. Perhaps even more mysteriously, Rasmussen's random number generator shows a seven-point flip in those six days. And a twelve-point swing over the four days preceding that.

Six days ago, Rasmussen found his very odd results (Romney, Paul +2 over Obama) to be merely obvious, given the President's low approval ratings in his warped surveys. Now, however, the President's approval ratings are about the same. How, then, can we explain that Obama leads by five over Romney? Isn't Obama about as unpopular as he was six days ago, when Rasmussen found him losing to Romney and Paul? 

Rasmussen wants you to pay money to see the history of these daily trackers. Given what I just presented, doesn't this seem like a ridiculous proposition? Public opinion simply doesn't swing like that over a few days, especially when no major events that could drive such a shift have taken place. Today, Rasmussen's whims give Obama a 5 point lead over Romney, and an oddly-small three-point lead over Santorum.

Looking to the general election, the president leads Romney 47% to 42%. If Rick Santorum is the Republican nominee, the president leads 46% to 43%.

Overall, 46% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president's job performance. Fifty-three percent (53%) at least somewhat disapprove.

If 53% of "likely voters" disapprove of Obama, why do neither of the Republican candidates pull a majority of these "likely voters"? PPP shows Obama's job approval to break at 48/48, with 4% undecided. Rasmussen, however,  has a secret method to determine who will vote several months from now - his magical "likely voter" screen. This secret method involves removing self-identifying Democrats from survey results, because everyone "knows" that Democrats don't actually vote. Actually, in Rasmussen's world, Democrats who really dislike Obama will turn out, but not the others. 

So Rasmussen's daily tracker is probably really 'tracking' Republicans and Independents, with some disaffected Democrats thrown in for flavour.