Rasmussen remains irrelevant

Rasmussen, in his search for irrelevance, now shows Romney with a two-point lead over Obama in the general election match-up. Scotty wants you to pay him money to see his tracking history, but a recent summary can be seen here for free.

Rasmussen now (3/6 - 3/8) shows a Romney lead (45/47). Just a few days ago (3/3 - 3/5) this same pollster showed Obama with a six-point lead (48/42). Apparently, in Rasmussen's world, 8% of the nation's "likely voters" flipped in two days over to Romney. That just doesn't happen in the real world.

Let's look at HuffPo's chart:

Okay, so Obama has an average four-point lead outside of Rasmussen's skewed surveys. Aside from the Quinnipiac poll (2/14 - 2/20) showing Obama ahead by only two, no other pollster is showing the race as close as Rasmussen seems to.

In all likelihood, Rasmussen will continue to show this same pattern up to October. On some days, Obama will have leads. On other days, Romney will have the lead. Even in August, we can expect Rasmussen to keep showing Romney within the margin of error (MoE) at critical points. We can expect these critical points to include dates around Romney campaign speeches, when Rasmussen will attempt to prop up the Republican narrative with false hopes. 

In October, there will be some relatively meaningless event in the "big picture". Rasmussen will seize on this, and make it his "things changed" moment. His polling will suddenly show Obama with significant leads nationally, and in important swing states. And nobody will remember that this shill pollster spent more than a year prior to that giving Romney fake leads in his manipulated surveys. 

That's part of what this record is all about. That's partly why Rasmussen forces you to pay money to see his results. If you are willing to spend money for his polls, then you have a financial incentive to trust them. Nobody likes to admit that they got conned by a shill, after all.

You may say that the polls don't matter at this point in the cycle. I say that they do. The Republican narrative is that Obama is highly unpopular and very vulnerable. One would think, then, that polling should back that up. It really doesn't, though. And, if the polls don't matter at this point, then why is Rasmussen doing a daily tracker? In fact, the Right seems to be indirectly admitting that Obama isn't nearly as vulnerable as they believed he was - but they believe that they can convince the voters he is terrible in the future by way of a huge advertising campaign. 

Thus far, all that Rasmussen's bogus polling has shown is that 40% of the voters really, really dislike Obama. Even if you believe that to be true, how does Romney drawing only 7% above that number show Obama to be highly vulnerable? For a narrative built on 2010, Rasmussen's own bogus numbers do not bear out an idea that those outside of the Republican base are significantly breaking for the Republican alternatives.