ABC threatens Rasmussen polls for talking to Bannon and Fox News

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“Rasmussen must explain the nature of its relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm,” demanded Elliott Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at liberal ABC News and FiveThirtyEight.

The memo demanded details of how Rasmussen polls are conducted and calculated and gave Rasmussen a day to answer or be banned.

“Failure to reply, or failure to notify us of an intent to speedily reply, by the end of the day on Friday, June 30th, 2023 will be taken as a final concession of our grounds for a ban. The ban would take effect imminently thereafter,” it said.

“I am emailing you to send a final notice that FiveThirtyEight is considering formally banning Rasmussen Reports from its coverage,” Morris wrote. “Such a ban would result in being removed from listing on our main polls page and being excluded from all of our aggregation and election forecasting models. If banned, Rasmussen Reports would also be removed from our historical averages of polls and from our pollster ratings. Your surveys would no longer appear in reporting and we would write an article explaining our reasons for the ban.”

Instead of answering, Rasmussen published the letter from the chief of ABC polls, which have had a less accurate record than Rasmussen. It plans no response other than joking about it in a tweet.

Rasmussen pollster Mark Mitchell, a frequent guest on Bannon’s War Room podcast, told Secrets that the threat has “to us, all the hallmarks of left-wing cancellation kind of thing. They don’t have any power over us.”

Like all pollsters, Rasmussen is constantly fiddling with how to report more accurately in a world where fewer people want to work with pollsters and where partisanship has turned severe.

It is one of the few, if only, pollsters that are in the field every day asking questions, some of which the legacy pollsters don’t care for, such as this week’s headline-grabbing findings that many don’t believe President Joe Biden received 81 million votes in 2020 or today’s survey showing more support for overturning Roe v. Wade.

“What blows my mind is that most of the slander that people direct us really is about these third-rail topics that we touch that nobody else will,” Mitchell said. “And their response to us shouldn’t be, ‘Oh, you’re a right-wing pollster.’ It should be, ‘Oh, hey, we conducted our own poll to dispute you,’ and that is never what they say. Never. So, pretty transparent.”

Rasmussen is sometimes attacked as a conservative pollster that overweighs Republicans, but in fact, it typically overweighs Democrats and is one of the few to show higher approval ratings for Biden consistently.

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Ironically, FiveThirtyEight’s list of favored pollsters showed Rasmussen as the fifth most accurate of the 2020 race, ahead of ABC. And in an editorial note, FiveThirtyEight high-fived Rasmussen as one of those with the “lowest average error.”

Mitchell said the reason many media outlets, including Washington Secrets, quote Rasmussen regularly is because it has integrity, explains in detail its methods, and reveals any sponsor of polls.