Rassmussen Reports has “a lead story on its website”:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/october_2009/43_view_obama_s_olympic_trip_as_bad_idea_36_disagree trumpeting the fact that 43% of the country thinks Obama’s trip to Copenhagen is a bad idea. Fair enough, but my immediate suspicion was that the vast majority of the survey respondents holding that opinion would be people inclined to see anything Obama does as a bad idea. So I set off to try to find some cross-tabs for this question (being particularly interested in partisanship and “region”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/09/are_republicans_now_officially.html), only to find the following announcement:
bq. Crosstabs and ( _sic_ ) are available to Premium Members
“Premium members”:http://www.rasmussenreports.com/premium_service_description, it turns out, are those willing to pay $19.95 a month, which immediately raised two questions in my mind. First, is there anyone out there who is willing to pay $19.95 a month for cross-tabs from Rasmussen? Second, how bad must the rest of their business be going if they have been reduced to selling cross-tabs on line?
More seriously, what is the responsibility of polling organizations that provide marginals that will clearly be “quoted in news stories”:http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/27806.html to also provide cross-tabs so we can begin interpret exactly what those marginals mean? Let me then add my voice to other bloggers following public opinion (“here”:http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2009/10/regional-differences-in-the-gop-image.html and “here”:http://www.pollster.com/blogs/strategic_vision_time_for_tran.php) calling for survey firms to make more of an effort to provide pertinent cross-tabs with their survey reports (and especially cross-tabs for partisanship and region).