Mark Mitchell is the head pollster for Rasmussen Reports and a leader in the information war. He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear submarine officer turned financier and technological leader. He founded himself as an outsider in an industry desperate to reassert their integrity, and that is, of course, political polling.
00:00:00.000Welcome back to the Stone Zone. We're joined now by Mark Mitchell. He is the head pollster for Rasmussen Reports, and I would say a leader in the information war.
00:00:10.600He is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear submarine officer turned financier and technological leader, but he founded himself as a real outsider in an industry desperate to reassert their integrity, and that is, of course, political polling.
00:00:30.000Rasmussen Reports has made a name for itself, not just for predicting with extraordinary accuracy election outcomes, but also questioning other pollsters in their methodology and timing, and questioning Americans about things that the establishment doesn't want questions asked about.
00:00:49.160Mark Mitchell, thanks for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
00:00:53.240It's great to be here, Roger. Let me tell you how happy I am about this.
00:00:56.720It's a list of people who are like, oh, you're going to love Roger. You should talk to him.
00:01:00.100John Fawcett, Brandon Hauser, I was talking about today.
00:01:03.700Rich Barris, they all give shout-outs, and I'm really happy to be here.
00:01:07.060Well, I am myself, of course, a consumer of survey research going back in a 50-year career in American politics.
00:01:14.840Mark, I remember the days when all of the polls were taken at the doorstep.
00:01:21.220That's how far back I'd go in the days of Gallup and Harris.
00:01:24.780And I talk often about how easily it is to rig a poll.
00:01:32.160In my view, there are two kinds of polls.
00:01:35.240One kind is in which the person who commissions the poll and a competent pollster are trying to get an accurate measure of public opinion within the time frame that the poll is taking,
00:01:48.760memorizing and realizing that any poll is a snapshot of a moment in time.
00:01:54.300In fact, technically, because public opinion, particularly in this day of mass media, public opinion changes very quickly.
00:02:03.640Any poll, generally speaking, is only good for that episecond in which it is taken.
00:02:09.860Now, public opinion doesn't shift that dramatically that quickly, but it does shift.
00:02:43.980So the first question I have to ask you is, first of all, tell us about your predictions based on your own polling in the last presidential election.
00:02:55.260Well, we're always trying to be accurate, and sometimes it's harder than others.
00:02:59.080There are very particular reasons why it was harder than normal back in 2020.
00:03:50.180But what it doesn't change about is Trump, because once you've decided to support Trump, you're pretty much there.
00:03:56.120Like, you've pretty much gone through the process, in my opinion.
00:03:59.300After everything they've thrown at him, the amount of psychological operations you have to overcome to be a Trump supporter, you know, he's earned very sticky results.
00:04:07.300And that's what I saw, and what I also saw was every other pollster except for a couple of other independent ones shilling so hard for Kamala Harris, six, seven, eight, even nine points to the left of me.
00:04:20.760I think I shamed them back into hurting at the end to be a little bit less inaccurate.
00:04:25.780But they were doing everything in their power, in my opinion, to try and get Kamala – there were Harris plus six polls, and she lost the national popular vote.
00:04:34.180And not one single mainstream media or academic research institution, not one of them, put out a map that showed that Kamala Harris was going to lose, an electoral map, and we did.
00:04:46.500We had Trump winning five out of the six swing states.
00:04:51.480And everybody called us a right-leading pollster, but no, in our swing states, we were actually a little bit too left, believe it or not, almost the full point.
00:05:07.320I found a tremendous tendency, particularly right after they dumped Biden and they anointed Kamala Harris.
00:05:15.380By the way, these were the people who kept whining about our lack of respect for democracy, but they nominated a candidate for president that not a single Democrat, primary, or caucus voter voted for.
00:05:26.700Just a little reminder I had to throw in there.
00:05:29.720But in almost every case, I saw this great tendency to oversample Democrats as if they were trying to create this psychological claim that she was surging, she was coming on strong, she was beating Trump.
00:05:44.920Virtually every poll, when I got into the cross-tabs, I found them oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans.
00:05:52.680So, and when you add that to the millions of dollars pouring in through Act Blue, virtually all of it laundered money, they were trying to create this idea that there was some kind of surge for her.
00:06:06.920Well, we both know she couldn't even fill a rally hall, she couldn't fill a stadium, whereas Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate I've ever worked for, and that's, I've been through 13 presidential campaigns, the only presidential candidate I ever saw where he didn't have to go out and work to raise a crowd.
00:06:26.380All he had to do was announce that he was coming, and you would be guaranteed a full house, in fact, an overflow crowd.
00:06:33.020Yet, they even tried to claim that he was having trouble filling his rally halls, which, of course, was never, ever the case.
00:06:40.840Let's talk for a minute about what's going on right now, because you see polling outlets like ABC and Fox News claiming that Trump's polling is tanking and giving him the worst possible 100-day approval rating.
00:07:08.040If you look at the history of Google searches for Trump approval, Bush approval, Biden approval, Obama approval, Trump approval just has, like, twice as much search volume as everybody else, and that's because they're pushing narratives and headlines, trying to convince everybody that America hates this guy.
00:07:22.620But, you know, he had his first presidency and then added votes, and then I think won a second time, and then added votes.
00:07:29.460And he keeps adding votes, and he keeps adding support, and all they're left with, they don't have political power now.
00:07:34.540So they're trying this disgusting, mean girls tactic of, again, trying to convince everybody that Trump's not cool.
00:07:41.900Now, I'll tell you, his approval is not great, but that's, I think, more of a reflection of the fact that we're on the cusp of a civil war and nothing to do with – like, we're just not in a country that's going to give Trump an 80 percent approval rating like they did George W. Bush.
00:07:54.400It's not going to happen, but he's doing pretty well.
00:07:57.260I had him at 48 percent today, totally underwater two points, totally different than the negative 13, negative 14 points.
00:08:04.320But what's crazy is you can look at RealClearPolitics and see they essentially planned this as a media hit.
00:08:10.040That ABC headline, Trump's the worst 100-day polling in 80 years.
00:08:13.480I bet they wrote that a month ago, and it's like everybody was rushing to get their homework in to dump all their scummy polls into the weekend news cycle.
00:08:20.960It's like CNN, CBS, ABC, Washington Post, Reuters, Ipsos, and even Fox News gave Trump the worst polling that they have this cycle all over the weekend on purpose, I think, to tank his RealClearPolitics aggregate just to get those headlines.
00:08:39.080Really desperate tactics, if you think about it, and the independent pollsters were, like, looking around and, no, like, our numbers don't look like these guys at all.
00:08:47.680And they're so – like, the crosstabs immediately tell you they're so scummy.
00:08:52.680If you look at the ABC one, they have Trump underwater six points on the issue of immigration.
00:09:00.520In my numbers, 65 percent of America supports Trump's massive deportation programs, and he's getting rated well on all these issues, even the economy.
00:09:08.900We had Trump at a 46 percent excellent or good on the economy, and even though that's his worst issue, that's better than any issue that Biden was ever rated by on any – like, ever, in all of our polling.
00:09:21.000And so this whole scenario where every single pollster structurally shows that Trump does worse, it's all fake.
00:09:29.420It's all a reaction to the anti-establishment candidate, the person who's going to try and end the gravy train, the big corporate marriage of power, capitalism and political power that's caused globalism, that's stolen the American dream, that's basically crushed people.
00:09:47.720And it's like, no, your fake media narratives aren't going to work anymore because people remember what it was like under Joe Biden, and they want Donald Trump to fix it.
00:09:56.440This shrimp and coconut sauce is divine.
00:13:20.200Who is the biggest enemy that the United States currently faces?
00:13:24.580And we put North Korea, Iran, Russia, you know, China, all the normal actors.
00:13:29.700Then we put the Democrat Party and the Republican Party also.
00:13:34.180And people say that the Democrat Party is America's number one biggest enemy, like 30%, followed by China, roughly 20%, followed by the Republicans in the high teens.
00:13:45.420And if you look at Russia, it's like 12%.
00:13:48.620North Korea and Iran are in middle single digits.
00:13:52.940And so I think this really reflects part of the Trump movement in that Americans might have an opinion about Ukraine or Israel or whatever,
00:14:02.220but very much in the forefront of their mind and why they're making their votes is domestic issues, is divisiveness, is affordability and a problem with their future.
00:14:13.920I mean, we have numbers in the low 30s of people who say that they're better off than they were four years ago.
00:14:20.280And only 22% say today's children will have it better off than their parents.
00:14:23.720Those are existential problems for our republic.
00:14:27.940And at the end of the day, Ukraine, I don't think, just captures the share of mind.
00:14:32.940We have about two and a half minutes left in this segment.
00:14:38.720With the advent of cell phones, with the advent of the Internet, with fewer and fewer people having hard-line phones in their home,
00:14:47.280and fewer Americans willing to open the door to a stranger, given these times, it has to make the job of being a pollster far more difficult.
00:14:56.380How do you go about making sure that you are getting a sample that is an accurate reflection of the electorate?
00:15:03.040That's true, and people have tackled the problem different ways.
00:15:07.360What most mainstream media organizations are doing is piling into these really limited panels of only 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 people,
00:15:14.240like the Ipsos panel and the YouGov panel.
00:15:17.300We still do robodialing landline calling for a little bit less than half of our polls because 90 million people still have them,
00:15:24.300and we have 400,000 people that like to answer our polling.
00:15:26.740But then we go to online panels, and those are tougher.
00:15:30.620You pay people to take the response, and you never really know who's on the other end of it.
00:15:34.980But it's mostly because our money comes not from a boss, not from a political party, not from dark money NGOs.
00:15:42.880It comes from subscribers and advertisers.
00:15:45.300So at the end of the day, I want to be accurate, or our business won't exist.
00:15:53.000And the way I can tell you is that, you know, ABC and Reuters have been inaccurate for like 12 years now polling with the Ipsos panel,
00:16:01.240but you haven't seen them get any better.
00:16:03.020So at a certain point, it ultimately comes down to will.
00:16:06.580In 10 or 20 years, maybe I'll be polling AI bots, or maybe I'll be, you know, casting chicken bones and doing dark magic.
00:16:12.680I don't know, but there will always be election prediction, and I think that we're reaching more people than almost everybody.
00:16:19.180And we haven't even needed to go to cell phone yet, although we will at some point.
00:16:23.540But you raise an interesting question at the end of the day with so many scammers out there.
00:16:28.020The person who answers a cell phone poll, maybe it tells you more about that person and their mentality than it does about the actual population.