Rasmussen: Obama still leads in "Core Four"

Not that Rasmussen's polling has any particular value at this point, but I've included this poll to illustrate the conservative narrative. 

Rasmussen's latest poll of the "Core Four" States (FL, NC, VA, OH) shows Obama leading 47/44 in a match-up with Romney. 

President Obama remains slightly ahead of the Republican front-runners in combined polling of the key swing states Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. New Rasmussen Reports telephone surveying finds that Obama picks up 47% of the vote to Romney’s 44%. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided. That's little changed from a week ago when Obama led Romney 47% to 42%. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

The survey of 500 Likely Voters in Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia was conducted on March 24-29, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Other pollsters, not surprisingly, have shown quite different results for most of these States.

• NC: PPP  49/46 (O +3)
• VA: Marist 52/35 (O +17), PPP  48/42 (O +6), Quinnipiac 47/43 (O +4)
• OH: Marist 50/38 (O +12), PPP 49/42 (O +7), Quinnipiac 47/41 (O +6)
• FL: Quinnipiac 49/42 (O +7) 

The thing to note here is that Rasmussen is showing these four States to be within the margin of error (MoE). These are crucial States for the GOP to win. For example, if Obama wins FL (27 EV), he pretty much wins the election, and can afford to lose the other three States. Rasmussen can't cede them to Obama and still contend that Romney will win the election. Instead, he takes five entire days to poll 500 "likely voters", and comes up with results that basically say that his polling is so shoddy that it's possible Romney is tied with Obama. If you are a Republican "true believer", that's what you see when you read those numbers. If you have a strong enough imagination, you can look at those numbers and see Romney leading.

Statistically speaking, there is no real difference between results showing Obama up by four and another result showing Obama up by three. One can only wonder why Rasmussen polled these four States two weeks in a row, if it takes him five days to do each survey. Since these States are so crucial, one can also wonder why Rasmussen doesn't just poll them individually. It all comes down to giving Scotty enough room to weasel out of his own results. As we get closer to the election, Rasmussen will declare some relatively minor event to be his "things changed" moment, and his results will come into line with other pollsters. Then, post-election, he will point to these polling results within 40 days of the election to prove his 'accuracy', and ignore the previous year's results that were glaring outliers.