He’s been under fire from liberal pundits and pollsters for showing the presidential race so close, but Scott Rasmussen said that his competition is now catching up to where he’s been for months: the race is tight and starting to trend in Mitt Romney’s direction.
“There are two bits of common ground,” he said. “First, the numbers have shifted in Romney’s favor. Second, the president’s support is between 45% and 49%. That suggests a close race as we have been reporting for months,” he added.
Advising people how to read polls, Rasmussen cautioned the media and pundits to essentially ignore polls that show a rapid, almost wild, short-term swing in voter preferences. “That,” he said in an online posting, “doesn’t happen in the real world. A more realistic assessment shows that the race has remained stable and very close for months.”
Even the shift to Romney has not been as dramatic a surge as some in the media have touted. “Since last week’s debate, the numbers have shifted somewhat in Romney’s direction, but even that change has been fairly modest,” said Rasmussen.
He used some figures to drive home the closeness of the presidential race: “Over the past 100 days of tracking, Romney and Obama have been within two points of each other 72 times. Additionally, on 89 of those 100 days, the candidates have been within three points of each other.”
In 2008, when Rasmussen won the gold medal for picking the final vote percentage correctly, the pattern was similar, he said, when his polling didn’t fluctuate as radically as some of the national polls. “In 2008, we showed virtually no change during the final 40 days of the campaign. Then-candidate Obama was between 50% and 52% in our polling every single day. He generally held a five- or six-point lead, occasionally bouncing up to an eight-point advantage and only once falling below a four point-lead. This stable assessment of the race is consistent with the reality of what we know about voter behavior. Obama won the election by a 53% to 46% margin.”
