Dem
51
GOP
49
If you take a look at the FiveThirtyEight pollster rating for Rasmussen Reports, you'll discover the outfit has a "B," which is solid. However, that grade may not reflect Rasmussen's track record as much as it does the shortcomings of trying to assign a single, simple rating to pollsters. Given that Nate Silver & Co. are committed to objective answers, the rating is based on things that are ultimately measureable, namely election outcomes. Rasmussen tends to be pretty accurate in predicting election results in red and purple states and somewhere between OK and laughable in blue states (like the time they predicted that Daniel Inouye would win the 2010 Senate race in Hawaii by 13 points and he won by 53). That's a combo that averages out to, well, a B.
Meanwhile, where Rasmussen really goes nuts—knowing that it won't affect their ratings, since the results are not testable—is in their opinion polling. Which, in most cases, is really more like push polling. They tend to ask extremely leading and/or loaded questions, hoping and expecting the results will generate attention and will get the firm's clients and potential clients (most of them Republicans) excited. A case in point is Rasmussen's latest offering, in which they apparently asked only two questions: (1) "Do you agree or disagree with the statement 'It's OK to be white'?" and (2) "Do you agree or disagree with the statement 'Black people can be racist, too'?"
We are going to focus on the first of the two questions, as that's the one that turns out to be relevant (more later). To start, Rasmussen is somewhat famous for being opaque about its sampling methods and its number crunching. Second, if you had never heard that question before, you might well struggle to figure out exactly what it is asking you. Third, if you had heard it before, it would almost certainly be because it's a right-wing, white nationalist slogan. That is to say, it's a lesser known version of "white lives matter." Needless to say, a lot of people would disagree with "white lives matter," not because of their views on white lives, but because of their views on the underlying political messaging that is encoded in that phrase.
Of course, Rasmussen knows that considerably fewer people know "It's OK to be white" than "white lives matter," which is why the pollster chose the former and not the latter. And they got the "shocking" result they wanted, assuming you squint very carefully. Among Black respondents, 8% somewhat disagreed with "It's OK to be white," 18% strongly disagreed, and 21% were not sure. So, if you assume Rasmussen reported its numbers accurately, and you then spin those numbers aggressively, and you ignore the subtext of "It's OK to be white," you could decide that those numbers are telling you that 47% (8% + 18% + 21%) of Black people are unwilling to commit to the idea that it's OK to be white.
We are confident that readers of this site would never swallow a Rasmussen poll without many fistfuls of salt. And though we may seem to be crapping on Nate Silver in the above paragraph, he also knows full well that this is a dubious polling house. He's written about it numerous times (most famously here). On the other hand, not getting the memo (perhaps because he did not wish to get the memo) was "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams. He's lurched rigtward and Trumpward in an aggressive way in the past 6-7 years, and developed a taste for conspiracy theories, sexism, dog-whistle racism and white grievance. He does a "show" every night on YouTube entitled Real Coffee with Scott Adams in which he basically rants and raves for an hour for the benefit of his 130,000 or so subscribers.
In the Friday episode, Adams decided to share his views on the Rasmussen poll (see the video here, if you really want to). And here are his comments:
[Rasmussen] said: "Do you agree with or disagree with the statement 'It's OK to be white?'" That was an actual question. 47 percent of Black respondents were not willing to say it's OK to be white. That's actually—that's, like, a real poll. If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people—according to this poll, not according to me—that's a hate group.
In case anyone had missed Adams' move from dog-whistle racism into outright racism, he later opined that white people should "get the hell away from Black people."
Who knows what the heck happened here. Following Adams' public pronouncements in the last few years, it is entirely plausible that he is not well, mentally. Alternatively, maybe he's ranted and raved for so many years at this point, he concluded that he was invincible. Or maybe he was looking to go full-bore, and to set himself up for a lucrative gig as staff cartoonist for The Blaze, or Breitbart, or Stormfront. In any event, Adams was canceled so fast it practically produced a sonic boom. Over the weekend, he lost his syndicator, his agent, his book publisher and many hundreds of newspapers.
As far as we can tell, the right-wing media is not willing to touch a potato quite this hot. That means that Adams' most prominent defender thus far has been... Elon Musk, who took to his billion-dollar boondoggle of a social media platform to declare that "the media is racist [against] whites and Asians." Hmmmmmm. Allow us to do a quick timeline check:
Call us crazy, but we don't think Musk has a whole lot of credibility here.
In any event, there will undoubtedly be some carping that Adams was censored, or that he's not being afforded his First Amendment rights, or that he's a victim of political correctness gone amok. Nonsense. What happened here, obviously, is that the market spoke. Newspapers (and Adams' publisher) decided that they would make less money with him on board than they would with him overboard. So, overboard he went. Too bad for him, but that's the way the bigotry crumbles. If he can't catch on at The Blaze, maybe he can land a gig ghostwriting "newly discovered" Roald Dahl books.
And that concludes today's lesson in reading polls. (Z)