Actually, I remember that poll specifically, and I stated at the time that Bloomberg's was a clear outlier.
There was a thread about that a few weeks ago.
Notice there is no Bloomberg poll included here.
As far as past polls go, Rasmussen was tied for sixth among the major pollsters in the 2008 presidential race, so I'm not really sure what you're driving at there...
Where did you get the notion that Rasmussen was tied for sixth among the major pollsters in the 2008 presidential race? If I remember correctly Rasmussen was the most accurate of the major pollsters by quite a large margin.
Most Accurate Pollsters in 2008 election | Political Vindication
And from Wikki...
"Evaluations of accuracy and performance
[edit]Favorable
FOX News contributors Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen (a coauthor of Rasmussen) wrote that Rasmussen has an “unchallenged record for both integrity and accuracy.”[16]The Wall Street Journal stated that "Mr. Rasmussen is today's leading insurgent pollster" and "a key player in the contact sport of politics."[17] Slate Magazine and The Wall Street Journal reported that Rasmussen Reports was one of the most accurate polling firms for the 2004 United States presidential election and 2006 United States general elections.[18][19][not in citation given] In 2004 Slate magazine "publicly doubted and privately derided" Rasmussen's use of recorded voices in electoral polls. However, after the election, they concluded that Rasmussen’s polls were among the most accurate in the 2004 presidential election.[18] According to Politico, Rasmussen's 2008 presidential-election polls "closely mirrored the election's outcome".[20]
In the January 2010 special election for the Senate seat from Massachusetts, Rasmussen Reports was the first to show that Republican Scott Brown had a chance to defeat Martha Coakley. Just after Brown's upset win, Ben Smith at Politico reported, “The overwhelming conventional wisdom in both parties until a Rasmussen poll showed the race in single digits in early January was that Martha Coakley was a lock. (It's hard to recall a single poll changing the mood of a race quite that dramatically.)"[21] A few days later, Public Policy Polling released the first poll showing Brown in the lead, a result differing from Rasmussen's by 10 points.[22] Rasmussen's last poll on the race found Coakley with a 2-point lead, when she in fact lost by 5 points, a 7-point error.[23]
A quote from Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia posted on the Rasmussen homepage reads,"Rasmussen produces some of the most accurate and reliable polls in the country today."[24]
[edit]Criticism
[edit]Nate Silver
In 2010, Nate Silver of the New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight wrote the article “Is Rasmussen Reports biased?”, in which he mostly defended Rasmussen from allegations of bias.[25] However, by later in the year, Rasmussen's polling results diverged notably from other mainstream pollsters, which Silver labeled a "house effect".[26] He went on to explore other factors which may have explained the effect such as the use of a likely voter model,[27] and claimed that Rasmussen conducted its polls in a way that excluded the majority of the population from answering.[28] Silver also criticized Rasmussen for often only polling races months before the election, which prevented them from having polls just before the election that could be assessed for accuracy. He wrote that he was “looking at appropriate ways to punish pollsters” like Rasmussen in his pollster rating models who don’t poll in the final days before an election.[29]
After the 2010 midterm elections, Silver concluded that Rasmussen's polls were the least accurate of the major pollsters in 2010, having an average error of 5.8 points and a pro-Republican bias of 3.9 points according to Silver's model.[30] He singled out as an example the Hawaii Senate race, in which Rasmussen, in a poll completed three weeks before the election, showed incumbent Daniel Inouye only 13 points ahead, whereas in actuality he won by a 53% margin[31] – a difference of 40 points from Rasmussen's poll, or "the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998".[30] Silver named Quinnipiac University Poll as the most accurate poll of the election cycle. However, according to RealClearPolitics, in toss-up races where both Rasmussen Reports and Quinnipiac polled, the Rasmussen Reports final poll was closer to the mark in every race.[32][33][34] The two firms projected the same candidate to win every race but the Florida gubernatorial race, where Rasmussen correctly projected Rick Scott's victory, while Quinnipiac showed Alex Sink with the lead.[35]"
You may not LIKE Rasmussen's poll results but they are widely seen as the most accurate major polls and have been for many years.