slate | I cannot overemphasize how dumb it is that Adams finally filleted his reputation in full over a trolly Rasmussen poll. If you’re not familiar, Rasmussen is a right-leaning pollster that produces semi-mainstream polls but is noted for its murky methods and what the New York Times has called “dubious sampling and weighting techniques.” Rasmussen’s results are often an outlier when it comes to, say, presidential approval numbers, as when Donald Trump famously cited a Rasmussen poll when it claimed to show a 50 percent job approval rating, more than 10 points higher than Gallup’s report at the time.
We don’t know the exact methodology used for the poll. In a press release touting its results, Rasmussen teased “additional information” behind a paywall. I signed up for a platinum membership, but I found only a brief text summary of the findings.
Rasmussen said it presented 1,000 respondents with a two-question prompt to quantify “the ‘woke’ narrative” in America: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘It’s OK to be white’ ” and “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘Black people can be racist, too.’ ” Respondents were asked to choose between “strongly agree,” “somewhat agree,” “somewhat disagree,” “strongly disagree,” and “not sure.” The results, as shared on Twitter once the firestorm began:
Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value—which I’d discourage—that means it found about 34 Black people who answered “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” We have no more information about why. (Adams got to his figure by also including Black respondents who answered “not sure.”)
If you have any doubt about what Rasmussen is doing here, I encourage you to take in the big doofus energy in the video below, this time featuring Rasmussen’s head of polling, Mark Mitchell:
"It's okay to be white."
72% of Americans agree, 12% disagree
69% of Democrats agree, 12% disagree
"Black people can be racist, too"
79% of Americans agree, 12% disagree
71% of Democrats agree, 19% disagree
Mitchell, who until a couple of years ago worked on Walmart e-commerce, assumes the posture of a wannabe truth-telling media personality: “We tell you what America really thinks. And I can tell you that increasingly the reality of American public opinion does not match what you’re being told in the news.” He says the “Is it OK to be white?” question “would literally melt the brain of a mainstream journalist if they try to put these numbers to ink.”
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