Pollster sees profit in tight 2004 presidential election race

By JOHN F. HARRIS of The Washington Post

With only 24 hours left in a riveting presidential race, anyone with an interest in politics is desperate for the latest trends from battleground states. No need to prolong the suspense: As of Saturday night, President Bush was up by one point over Sen. John F. Kerry in Florida and Ohio, down by two points in Pennsylvania.

Who says? That would be Scott Rasmussen, who is following this anxious election with contentment from his hometown Ocean Grove, N.J., confident that he is divining the mysteries of democracy with the help of a computerized phone bank in Texas and several pleasant-voiced women in the Midwest.

Rasmussen is a model of a proliferating—and, in some quarters, controversial—new breed in politics: the entrepreneurial pollster.

Traditionally, most political pollsters had party affiliations, generally working for one candidate or the other, or else polled on behalf of news media organizations or think tanks. Rasmussen—who as a young man joined with his father as a founder of ESPN—a few years back saw a new polling niche to be filled by feeding an insatiable appetite among political junkies in the general public. His political polls are not conducted for clients; they are conducted for himself, with publicity and profits as the motive.

“We serve a different audience,” said Rasmussen, 48, in a telephone interview. “We are here to make some money.”

His business model is organized around a paradox of American politics: Although voters often bemoan polls and the politicians who rely excessively on them, many ordinary Americans delight in the data they produce. Rasmussen's Web site, www.rasmussenreports.com, was getting 1.3 million hits a day last week from people who wanted to know the latest about his daily national tracking poll, and the number is rising each day.

That's on the home page. For full access to the site, one must be a “premium member,'' which costs $95 annually and offers more detail on state-by-state tracking polls as well as Rasmussen's analysis. 5,000 people, he said, have signed up.

By comparison, the highest level of membership to pollster John Zogby's site costs $140. It allows access to the specifics of a poll's questions and responses broken down by categories, known by political insiders as the “cross tabs.”

Rasmussen in particular stirs controversy because of his polling methods. Unlike traditional pollsters, he does not have a room full of questioners phoning randomly nationwide. Instead, a computerized voice, using an automated calling system operated by a Texas firm, conducts the interviews. People contacted may answer by punching buttons on their telephone keypads.

Some academic experts on public opinion research believe such “robo calls” are methodologically unsound. By this reckoning, people are less likely to give thoughtful answers to a computer. Some mischief-makers, critics believe, might even be more prone to give deliberately false answers.

“I would not rely at all on the Rasmussen data,” said Michael Traugott, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who has written academic articles criticizing robo-calling. “The computer does not know who's really at the other end of the phone.”

Rasmussen counters that robo-calling has advantages. Each interview is the same, so no one can be affected by minor differences in wording or voice inflection. He hires voices of women in their thirties from Midwestern states--because his research has found they have the most pleasant, neutral-sounding voices—to record questions. The voices sound so open and inviting, he said, that many people do not realize right away that they aren't talking to a real person.

Rasmussen said his results are sound though he acknowledges that, like most pollsters, he's had hits and misses. In 2001, his data proved generally accurate for governors races in New Jersey and Virginia.

In 2000, by contrast, he had what he called his “Dewey Defeats Truman'' moment when Rasmussen tracking polls showed Republican George W. Bush widening his lead over Democrat Al Gore in the closing days, when as Election Day showed, the opposite was occurring.