Americans Say Wall Street Is Getting Away With Their Criminal Activities-- At Our Expense

No one ever gets punished, so they keep doing it again... and again

Rasmussen is generally recognized as part of the right-wing political machine. Their polling operation is normally a cheerleading squad for the GOP, not a serious investigation into public perceptions. It wasn't Rasmussen polling that inspired Donald Trump yesterday to declare that Ryan's plan is a death wish for Republicans. Both Quinnipiac and Herndon have shown in recent days-- as if the gigantic Republican upset in the conservative suburbs between Buffalo and Rochester weren't enough-- that voters are freaked out over the Republican Party's war against the middle class-- and particularly Paul Ryan's extremism.

Across the country, Republican candidates are starting to get cold feet about walking the plank for Ryan's Ayn Randian delusions the way the whole GOP caucus in the House did. Florida state Senate president and US senatorial candidate Mike Haridopolos is too scared of the teabaggers to say he opposes it but too scared of independent voters to say he supports it.

But yesterday in another matter near and dear to Randian sociopaths and Republicans in general-- abolishing regulations on Wall Street-- Rasmussen reported more heavy seas ahead for the GOP. Just as the Republicans are trying to water down regulations governing Wall Street predators, a huge majority of Americans say the government hasn't been tough enough on the banksters. Ras had no sugarcoating for their GOP clients on this one:

Many Americans believe the country's economic meltdown was primarily due to criminal behavior by some financial executives, and a sizable majority feel the federal government has not been aggressive enough in pursuing criminal behavior by top Wall Street executives.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 47% of American Adults think criminal behavior by some in the financial industry was the primary cause of the meltdown. Twenty-eight percent (28%) blame insufficient government regulation, while only 12% say it was due to uncontrollable economic circumstances. Thirteen percent (13%) are undecided. 

Just 13% believe the government has been aggressive enough in pursuing possible criminal behavior by major Wall Street bankers. Sixty-four percent (64%) disagree and say the government has not been aggressive enough. Another 23% are not sure.

But then 51% of Americans believe the federal government is more concerned with making Wall Street firms profitable than making sure the U.S. financial system works well for all Americans. Only 22% say the government is more concerned with making the system work for all, but 26% more are not sure.

...In October 2008 when the bank bailout was first being considered by Congress, 63% of voters said Wall Street will benefit more than the average taxpayer. That figure jumped to 80% by July of the following year. ...Two-out-of-three voters (68%) believe that government and big business work together against the interests of consumers and investors.  That view is shared across partisan, demographic and ideological lines.

Majorities of adults across all demographic groups believe the government has not cracked down on Wall Street enough. Investors are only slightly more likely than non-investors to think the government has been aggressive enough in pursuing possible criminality on Wall Street.

Government workers feel more strongly than those who work for private companies that criminal behavior among financial executives is chiefly to blame for the financial meltdown... Sixty-eight percent (68%) of adults continue to believe that most of the federal bailout money for the financial sector went right to the people who created the economic crisis. Americans have opposed the bailout of the financial industry from the start. 

Robert Reich has been writing about this endlessly. Tuesday evening I watched him patiently explain the vicious cycle of bankster foreclosures and economic downturns on CNN during Eliot Spitzer's show. On his blog yesterday he explained why the recovery has stalled and why economic growth is so anemic-- a "measly 1.8 percent annualized rate of the first quarter... not nearly fast enough to reduce our ferociously-high level of unemployment."

[H]ousing prices continue to fall. They’re now 33 percent below their 2006 peak. That’s a bigger drop than recorded in the Great Depression. Homes are the largest single asset of the American middle class, so as housing prices drop many Americans feel poorer. All of this is contributing to a general gloominess. Not surprisingly, consumer confidence is also down.

The problem isn’t on the supply side of the ledger. Corporate profits are still healthy. Big companies continue to sit on a cash hoard. Large and middle-sized companies can easily borrow more, at low rates.

The problem is on the demand side. American consumers, who constitute 70 percent of the total economy, can’t and won’t buy enough to get it moving. They justifiably worry they won’t be able to pay their bills or afford to send their children to college or to retire. Banks, with equal justification, are reluctant to lend to them. But as long as consumers hold back, companies remain reluctant to hire new workers or raise the wages of current ones, feeding the vicious cycle. ...Worse yet, state governments-- starved for revenue and constitutionally barred from running deficits-- continue to cut programs. Local governments are now in worse shape, laying off platoons of teachers and fire fighters.

Under normal circumstances, this would be the time for the federal government to take bold action to ward off a double dip.

For example, it could put more cash in peoples’ pockets while giving employers an extra incentive to hire by exempting the first $20,000 of earnings from payroll taxes, for a year or two. It could lend money to state and local governments. It could launch a new WPA (modeled after its antecedent during the Great Depression) to put the long-term unemployed to work on public projects. It could amend the bankruptcy law to allow people to include their prime residences in personal bankruptcy, thereby giving homeowners more leverage to get mortgage lenders to mitigate the terms of their loans. It could enlarge and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit so that the bottom 60 percent got a wage subsidy instead of a tax bill.

But these aren’t normal circumstances. America has been through a devastating recession that poked a giant hole in the federal budget. And with a presidential election coming up next year, both parties are already maneuvering for tactical advantage.

Since taking over the House of Representatives in January, Republicans have focused on cutting government spending and paring back regulations. Their colleagues in the Senate, whose leader has proclaimed his major goal to unseat President Obama, are almost as single-minded. Cynics might suspect Republicans of quietly hoping the economy stays rotten through Election Day.

Democrats, meanwhile, are behaving as if they’re powerless to affect the economy even though a Democrat occupies the White House and his appointees run the federal government. They’d rather not dwell on the slowdown because they don’t want to spook the bond market or add to the prevailing gloom (Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated comment about the nation’s “malaise” during the stagflation of the late 1970s has served as a permanent admonition for presidents to stay upbeat).

Democrats are staking their electoral hopes on continuing disarray among Republican presidential aspirants, as well as the Republicans’ suicidal plan to turn Medicare, the popular health insurance system for seniors, into vouchers that would funnel money to private, for-profit insurance companies.

The result is as if Washington were on another planet from the rest of the country (many Americans would argue this is hardly a new phenomenon).

The noisiest battle in the nation’s capital is over raising the statutory debt limit-- a game of chicken in which Republicans are demanding, in return for their votes, caps on future federal spending while Democrats insist on preserving the possibility of tax increases on the wealthy. Countless budget analysts are combing through endless projections of government revenues and expenditures in five or ten years. Think tanks and blue-ribbon panels are issuing voluminous reports on how to tame the budget deficit in decades to come. The President, meanwhile, is trying to appear as fiscally austere as possible-- keeping a lid on non-defense discretionary spending, freezing the wages of civil servants, and offering his own deficit-reduction plans.

Most Pollsters, Other Than Rasmussen, Which Is In Effect A Part of The GOP Propaganda Machine, Did Pretty Well This Cycle

Yesterday conservative Democrat Bob Etheridge conceded to reactionary psychopath Renee Ellmers, leaving just 5 House races still undecided. So although we don't know exactly how many seats the Democrats and Republicans won and lost, we do now know which pollsters did best and worst. Anzalone Liszt Research is the Blue Dog-oriented polling firm. Their House candidates for this cycle were winners Mike Quigley (IL-05), Larry Kissell (NC-08), Leonard Boswell (IA-03), Mike Doyle (PA-14), Heath Shuler (NC-11), Jason Altmire (PA-04), Luis Gutierrez (IL-04), Albio Sires (NJ-13) and Bob Brady (PA-01); plus losers Bobby Bright (AL-02), Debbie Halvorson (IL-11), Dina Titus (NV-03), Travis Childers (MS-01), John Salazar (CO-03) and Ron Klein (FL-22). They also consulted two House Members who attempted to win Senate seats, Charlie Melancon (LA-03) and Paul Hodes (NH-02). Like many of us, they asked the question, "how accurate were the polls?" Here's their report:

The benefit of elections is that pollsters are afforded the opportunity to assess the quality and accuracy of their polls. In this respect, 2010 was pretty good year for the polling community overall, with a few notable exceptions.

Looking at the national generic congressional ballot, many of the top public pollsters were very close to hitting both the final exit poll ballot margin (R+7) and the GOP percentage of the two-party vote (53%). This includes telephone surveys from Pew (R+6, 53%), NBC/WSJ (R+6, 53%), CBS/NYT (R+6, 53%), Ipsos/Reuters (R+6, 53%) and two internet-based surveys by YouGov/Polimetrix (R+7, 54%) and Zogby (R+5, 53%). A few polls overstated GOP performance, including CNN/ORC (R+10, 55%), Rasmussen (R+12, 57%), and Fox/Opinion Dynamics (R+13, 57%). The most notable and surprising outlier, however, was USA Today/Gallup, which showed Republicans with a whopping 15-point edge and 58% of the two-party vote. That would have translated into something on the order of a 90-seat pickup for the GOP, well above the projected 64-seat net pickup that the GOP will show when undecided races are called.

We noted earlier in the cycle that a pollster's choice of methodology has a clear effect on the numbers, and this was indeed the case with the top public polls in 2010. According to data complied by Mark Blumenthal at Pollster.com, the average predicted margin for surveys that sampled both landline and cell phones was R+6, compared to R+10 for surveys that sampled only landline phones. In other words, polls that included cell phones were more accurate.

The difference between phone, internet, and automated ("robo") surveys was less pronounced overall, with some exceptions. At the national level, the final Pollster.com trendline for the generic congressional ballot margin was R+7 for both telephone surveys (landline-only and landline/cell) and internet surveys, and R+8 for automated surveys. At the state level, the three most accurate polling firms each employed a different calling mode: Quinnipiac (phone, 21 polls, 3.3 points of average error); SurveyUSA (automated, 30 polls, 3.5 points), and YouGov (internet, 35 polls, 3.5 points). Rasmussen, by far the most prolific state-level pollster, was also by far the most inaccurate (105 polls, 5.8 points of average error), according to FiveThirtyEight.com.

Additionally, there was some divergence between polls released by Democratic and Republican firms this cycle. On balance, Democratic firms were more accurate at the Senate level, while Republican firms were more accurate at the House district level. At the Senate level, Democratic firms exhibited a fairly small 3.9-point average bias in favor of the Democratic candidate, compared to a 6-point bias in favor of the Republican candidate among GOP firms. At the House level, however, Republican firms showed 1 point of bias for GOP candidates compared to 9.7 points for Democratic firms-though again, some individual firms bucked this trend. This includes Anzalone Liszt Research, which was the second-most accurate among Democratic polling firms that released more than five polls this cycle.

And speaking of polls, a new one from Quinnipiac finds that 58% of Americans want to see Don't Ask, Don't Tell repealed, as opposed to 34% who don't. Among military families, 55% want to see repeal and 38% oppose repeal. Perhaps those findings have made Republicans Lisa Murkowski and John Ensign feel safe enough to say they would not vote against repealing DADT.

Why Wouldn't A Normal Person Just Hang Up If Rasmussen Calls?

This evening the Republican Party's polling firm, Rasmussen, called a friend of mine and, well... polled him. I just figured I'd mention that they sure do skewer their questions to create the narrative Grover Norquist, Karl Rove and their friends are requesting. I mean if you wonder what makes people as astoundingly stupid as the ones-- Jabba the Hutt included-- in the video Digby put up today (and which I embedded up top), it might have something to do with a national dialogue predicated on these kinds of confections:

(1) Will taxes go up under President Obama?
(2) Will government spending go up under President Obama?
(3) Are you more likely to support a candidate who opposes all tax increases, or one who promises to increase taxes only on the rich?
(4) Do tax cuts help the economy?
(5) Do government spending cuts help the economy?
(6) Who do you trust more, our political leaders or the American people?
(7) Has the federal government become a special interest group?
(8) Do Big Business and the government work together in ways that hurt consumers?

Rasmussen And Corporate Toadies In Cahoots; Pollster.com Named As Co-conspirator

-by Doug Kahn

Pollster.com is hawking charts that obfuscate the actual results of most of the reputable pollsters that are supposedly contained in them. Is obfuscate the right word for it? Let’s see: obfuscate, blur, shade, cloud, confuse, conceal, mask, cover up. Maybe dilute is better. Water down, thin out, adulterate, doctor. That’s the word I want. Doctor.
 
They display the actual polls and their percentages in a list, and then doctor them on the way into the charts. The math they use allows an individual pollster to supply results that substantially change, and even reverse, the results reported by other pollsters. Pollster.com is giving Rasmussen control over the national conversation on politics, with the help of credulous news people and political bloggers who display these charts on their web sites. I’m not going to name names. You know who you are.
 
Journalists in print and online reproduce the charts as though they were news, as though they represented reality, the truth. They don’t. One pollster can use Pollster.com to change Obama favorables into unfavorables, or a Democratic advantage on the House generic ballot into a Republican advantage.
 
A political poll doesn’t ask every eligible voter how they’re going to vote, they ask a sampling of voters. If you were to take a poll of 500 randomly selected voters, and do that 100 times, you’d get different results every time, but the results that are closer to reality will cluster around one number. Imagine a curve that looks like a bell; the top of the bell is the most frequent result, the presumed truth of the matter. By chance, some of the polls will be way off; those results are the tails, the bottom left and right edges of the bell, the ‘outliers.’ It should seem obvious that when you poll more people you get more reliable results. A common standard: you poll enough voters to make sure that if you did 100 polls, only 5 of them would be further than 6 percentage points away from reality.
 
Let’s look at the 2010 National Congressional generic ballot. Rasmussen is a prolific pollster. Since January 1, 2010 Rasmussen has reported polling 21,000 people, versus 18,786 for every other pollster combined. The reason you’d want to aggregate all the polls is to be more accurate by examining the responses of as many voters as possible. Polling is expensive, so polling numbers are hard to come by, especially in local races. Even if you simply add the results and average them, Rasmussen ends up being the overwhelming influence on the final result.
 
But that’s not the way these charts are created; the math that Pollster.com uses gives Rasmussen an even bigger advantage. They use a statistical method called regression analysis, the purpose of which is to make the trend line more closely match the reality of the situation, reduce the influence of random variations.
 
The frequency of Rasmussen’s reported results gives their figures a heavy influence on the charts. Pollster.com gives Rasmussen, an extreme outlier, an extra advantage just by the way the statistics are done. A regression analysis gives the more frequent pollster more control over the curve. That makes sense, but only because to use regression analysis in an honest way, you have to presume that all the results are comparable (in polling, that all the pollsters ask the same question) and that they’re all honestly reported figures.
 
Here’s the current 2010 National Congressional generic ballot chart, with a Republican advantage of 43.6% to 43%.
 

 You can reduce the advantage Rasmussen gets by using tools that Pollster.com gives you to customize the charts, for instance by increasing the ‘sensitivity’ of the trend line to more recent polls. There have been 25 polls in 2010, and six of them are from Rasmussen. Increasing the sensitivity gives the other 19 polls more influence. Here’s the same chart giving the non-Rasmussen pollsters more weight: a Democratic advantage, 44.7% to 42.8%. This is a swing of 2.5%.
 

 Here’s the chart the way I always look at Pollster.com trends, with the sensitivity on high and Rasmussen removed. Democratic advantage, 46.6% to 42%.
 

 You can set the sensitivity on high and use the tools to remove other pollsters from the mix, and I’ve done that with this chart and with the national charts measuring Obama job approval and Obama favorability rating. Removing Rasmussen produces a swing of up to 5%. You can’t produce anything more than a 1% swing removing any other pollster.
 
All through the year after Obama’s election, Pollster.com reported Rasmussen’s ‘Obama favorability’ as wildly divergent from all other pollsters. Mark Blumenthal, who runs the site, had inserted Rasmussen’s ‘Obama job approval’ numbers (which are always more negative than favorable ratings). After repeated complaints and objections that the Rasmussen results had to be wrong, he removed all of these numbers without telling anyone. His September 29, 2009 public explanation was buried on the site in a ‘P.S.’ to a complaint from someone else about an impossible Rasmussen result from Iowa. It made no logical sense, I don’t think:
 
“We discovered over the last few days that what we believed to be a weekly update of Barack Obama's favorable rating on RasmussenReports.com had been changed at some point to a weekly job approval rating, even though the labels still read favorable and unfavorable rather than approve and disapprove up until about a week ago. As such, we have removed the non-favorable ratings from our national Barack Obama favorable rating chart.”
 
That contradicts reality: for a year he reported numbers of respondents in the supposed Rasmussen favorability polls that were different from the numbers in the Rasmussen approval polls. How does that correspond to the explanation that it was a labeling error?
 
The Pollster.com charts, which understated Obama’s favorable rating advantage by almost 10%, were viewed hundreds of thousands of times on numerous political web sites. Arguably, it affected the fate of Democratic proposals in Congress.
 
Here’s something that needs an explanation. If you take the Obama favorability chart and restrict the date range to the 12 months between 11/20/08 and 11/20/09, you get a list that includes no Rasmussen results and a chart that corresponds:
 

 But when you use the customization tool to ‘remove’ the already absent Rasmussen, the chart numbers move! The ghost of Rasmussen past apparently influences the other numbers.
 

Something Rotten In The State Of Political Polling-- Has Strategic Visions Been making Up Polling Data?

-by Doug Kahn 
 
Over at Pollster.com today, Mark Blumenthal will probably explain why President Obama's 'favorable' rating is suddenly five percentage points better than it was yesterday. On Monday, Steve Singiser of DailyKos was saying how a 54.7%–37.5% favorability rating for Obama was no disaster, nothing portending a rout of House Democrats running for reelection, because he had a similar rating just before the November election. He used this chart, which no longer exists on Pollster.com. So the President is plus-17% in the polls. Except today, the Pollster.com chart shows the President with a 56.8%–34.6% rating, or plus-22%. The difference is that today's chart is missing about 200,000 voters Rasmussen polled over the past 11 months.

Mark is one of the internet's top polling analysts, and recently he's been commenting on the controversy surrounding polling results released by Strategic Visions, a Republican consulting group. It seems possible they've been making up their results. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com found anomalies in their published figures that make it clear it couldn't be the results of random polling. Certain digits were showing up more often in the last decimal place: 1, 2, and 3 occurred more frequently. So someone was just sitting around making up numbers. 

Someone pretty dumb, that is. Anyone who makes even a tiny effort to examine his/her own thinking will understand we all have favorite numbers. What's your favorite number from 0 to 9? And how could you possibly have a favorite number, anyway; are they like people? (I hope no one comes and takes me away for this, but to me all 10 digits have distinct personalities.) All of us have a certain amount of magical thinking going on upstairs. Feel free to discount this conclusion about all of us; my logic is compromised by my belief in magic. Or not.  

Anyway, the designated charlatan over at Strategic Visions didn't grok the concept that when you form the intention of making up random results, it causes the numbers you make up to not be random. Maybe your favorite number or numbers will come up more often, and maybe you'll make an effort to compensate for that, but your compensation won't be random. Even computerized 'random number generators' can't provide truly random results. What could be more obvious: you can't be intentionally or systematically random.
 
Back to Rasmussen: they report weekly on President Obama's favorability rating among likely voters, also on his job approval. The difference between the two somewhat eludes me, but I accept the results of hundreds of polls: we're more likely to feel favorably about someone than we are to approve of the job they're doing. I suppose that means liking them despite their faults. I try to resist that with the President, because when he's not doing a good job, it negatively affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Tens of millions of these people are on the brink of personal disaster, financially and otherwise. Whether I like the guy damn well better be vanishingly insignificant. 

Let me just say this directly: I believe that some of the polling numbers from Rasmussen Reports are really the result of deliberately skewed polling. I'm not saying they make up the numbers, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying their 'methods' make Obama look less popular than he really is. Because they don't like him and his policies, and they don't like Democrats and Democratic policies.
 
Pollster.com reports on the results of all the major polling firms, and then 'aggregates' the numbers in charts which show 18 months' worth of polling. These aggregates are considered reliable, and are very influential. (Steve Singiser wouldn't use them otherwise.) They do this even though each polling company uses somewhat different methodologies, and asks questions with slightly different wording. Presumably, aggregates make erroneous polls ['outliers', in the jargon of polling math] less influential, by overwhelming them with more accurate data. I'm skeptical. I think that lending legitimacy to funky polling by valuing the results on an equal basis with more rigorous mathematical analyses is something to be avoided, even if that means excluding certain polling firms.
 
Not expecting a response, I posted a 'suggestion' on the Pollster.com website:
 
August 9

"When the results of a single pollster (Rasmussen) among 10 raises the average disapproval figure by 4%(!), it's time to recognize that the single pollster isn't measuring the same question. You need to remove the Rasmussen result." 

August 10

"Doug,

Thanks for the feedback. For what it's worth, we've written about this issue previously, especially here and here ."

August 10

"Mark,

Having now seen the posts you sent me, and the comments by numerous mathematicians, I understand your reply to me is probably automated. If so, I don't blame you for it.
 
Nevertheless:
 
I'm no math whiz, so the following is a guess. Using a regression analysis, as you do, will tend to weigh more heavily the more numerous data points, like Rasmussen. That is, it has the effect of surmising that Rasmussen is more accurate because it is more frequent. A better method would take brownie points away from Rasmussen (and Gallup) for being so consistently outliers.
 
Let's be straightforward about the matter: the real question is whether the Rasmussen result belongs in the same class as the results of other pollsters, which is what you assume when you include their data points. Two questions arise: are they measuring the same thing, and are they measuring it in the same way? (Relatively speaking, of course, since methods vary among pollsters.)
 
Rasmussen assigns party identification in a different way when selecting its sample. I suggest you examine how much the Rasmussen results in the Democratic, Republican, and Independent segments differ from the larger group. You'll find the differences to be very small compared to the difference in the aggregated sample. Explain how you can conclude anything other than that Rasmussen exaggerates the Republican result.
 
Have they explained to you how their results always add up to 98, 99, or 100%?! May I suggest to you that they discard as nonresponsive many of the wishy-washy answers on the positive side, further skewing away from Democrats?
 
I think there's a high probability that Rasmussen is gaming you. If true, that will become quite a bit more obvious as time goes on. Since you have legitimate methodological reasons for excluding their results, I advise you to spare yourselves the embarassment, and the diminution of your professional reputations, by getting out in front of this." 

8/11

"Doug,

I assure you none of my email is automated (I wish), it's just that I get a lot of it and don't have time to re-argue points via email that we've already discussed on the blog. Sorry for that... The results Rasmussen releases omit a very small "no answer" category. They're included in the calculation but not in their daily release or tables." 

8/11

"Mark,

Thanks. No reason to apologize. Anyone carefully reading your site should reach the conclusion that you're committed to intellectual honesty.

The reason I pay attention to your analysis (the site itself) is your serious attention to the mathematical nuts and bolts of polling. It's the difference between real journalism (you) and all the wingnuttery available on the web. I know you're well aware of this, but it bears repeating: your reputation for honest analysis is bound to elicit false testimony.
 
It would be obvious to you if Rasmussen were straying from honesty. But what if they've simply leaned to one side or another of the allowable variations in methodology in a series of mathematical choices, each one affecting the previous slant, until in the end their result doesn't deserve to be aggregated with the other pollsters in your chart? (That's an exercise worth doing yourselves.) Whether they're doing so deliberately is almost beside the point. I wish you'd work from the premise that someone must be providing such a result (and with great frequency), simply because there's a 'market' for it.
 
When you talk about house effect, you're still implicitly accepting that the Rasmussen result is asking the 'same question'. (Not literally, of course.) Do they give you enough information about their practical application of professional standards to determine if they are producing a 'political' result? I'm well-acquainted, by experience, with the methods of firms who produce polling results for federal candidates.
 
I think you're influential enough that Rasmussen would have to comply with requests for information detailed enough so you can make a real judgment, so long as rejection of their result were a credible option." 

9/27

"Mark,

No Rasmussen presidential favorability for 9/13 through 9/20? It's been weekly." 

9/28

"Doug,

Thanks for noticing and contacting us about this. For some reason, they started labeling their 'favorable rating' with the labels normally used for their job approval question. We assume it was an error, but have a call in to check. That's the reason for the delay."
 
So that's all, except that on Tuesday, Pollster.com removed 47 weeks of Rasmussen polling results from the Obama favorability analysis and chart. Probability that Mark will explain that to us soon: 100%. 
 
The Singiser post is at: