IT HAD TO HAPPEN – AT 6:53 P.M. ET:  Liberals are on the attack against...  Al Qaeda?  The Taliban?  The Iranian mullahs?  Drug dealers?

No, the target is Scott Rasmussen, whose polls are often quoted here.  It seems that the liberal left doesn't like his numbers, which don't reflect the approved line that America has elected a messiah.  From The Politico:

Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama’s popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.

The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party’s national agenda.

On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. “Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale,” blared the Daily Kos this summer. “Rasmussen Reports, You Decide,” the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.

The ranting goes on and on.  At times, we almost feel for these people, in their suffering and disillusionment.

The charge is that Rasmussen rigs his polls by rigging the questions, by manipulating respondents, maybe even by changing the weather.  Rasmussen, in his scholarly gentleness, has a rather convincing answer:

Rasmussen is quick to point out the accuracy of his surveys — noting how close his firm was to predicting the final outcome in this fall’s New Jersey governor’s race. (Rasmussen’s final survey in the race showed Republican Chris Christie edging out Gov. Jon Corzine 46 percent to 43 percent. Christie beat Corzine 48 percent to 45 percent on Election Day.) And he argues that he was among the first pollsters to show Obama narrowing the gap with Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

Last year, the progressive website FiveThirtyEight.com’s pollster ratings, based on the 2008 presidential primaries, awarded Rasmussen the third-highest mark for its accuracy in predicting the outcome of the contests. And Rasmussen’s final poll of the 2008 general election — showing Obama defeating Arizona Sen. John McCain 52 percent to 46 percent — closely mirrored the election’s outcome.

Take that, lefties!

Rasmussen, for his part, explained that his numbers are trending Republican simply because he is screening for only those voters most likely to head to the polls — a pool of respondents, he argues, that just so happens to bend more conservative this election cycle.

Which is why we quote Scott Rasmussen.  His approach, in our view, is the most solid, and his track record, which is easily determined, backs him up.

January 2, 2010