Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports’ pollster, exposes how mainstream polls manipulate results through biased sampling and question wording, citing 2020’s ignored Trump leads and suppressed data. He reveals 34% now say U.S. overcommits to Ukraine while voters trust Trump more on foreign policy, yet polls like NYT/Sienna’s 37% Trump share rely on skewed samples. Domestic threats? The Democrat Party tops concerns (30%), ahead of China, as economic struggles fuel distrust—while rural hospitals face congressional cuts despite bipartisan reliance on their 24/7 emergency care. [Automatically generated summary]
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
Welcome 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.
He 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 desperately desperate to reassert their integrity, and that is, of course, political polling.
Rasmussen's 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.
Mark Mitchell, thanks for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
It's great to be here, Roger.
Let me tell you how happy I am about this.
The list of people who are like, oh, you're going to love Roger.
You should talk to him.
John Fawcett, Brandon Hauser, I was talking about today.
Rich Barrish, they all give shout outs, and I'm really happy to be here.
Well, I am myself, of course, a consumer of survey research going back in a 50-year career in American politics.
Mark, I remember the days when all of the polls were taken at the doorstep.
That's how far back I go in the days of Gallup and Harris.
And I talk often about how easy it is to rig a poll.
In my view, there are two kinds of polls.
One kind is which the person who commissions the poll and a competent pollster are trying to get an accurate measure of public opinion within the timeframe that the poll is taken, memorizing and realizing that any poll is a snapshot of a moment in time.
In fact, technically, because public opinion, particularly in this day of mass media, public opinion changes very quickly.
Any poll, generally speaking, is only good for that episecond in which it is taken.
Now, public opinion doesn't shift that dramatically that quickly, but it does shift.
Then there's the other kind of poll.
That's the kind of poll that is designed to get a desired result, either for fundraising or public relations reasons.
There's a big difference.
And polls can be rigged by the wording of the questions, the order of the questions, the accuracy of the sample.
There are many, many ways to rig a poll to get a desired result.
That's not what you do at Rasmussen.
No, it's not.
So 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.
Well, we're always trying to be accurate, and sometimes it's harder than others.
There are very particular reasons why it was harder than normal back in 2020.
We don't have to get into that.
But this time out, I was polling Joe Biden versus Donald Trump all the way back into 2021.
And every single poll, we had Donald Trump winning by massive amounts.
And of course, it tightened up a little bit, but we were pretty much the only people saying that.
I literally had never one poll showing Joe Biden up in the last year of our polling.
And then, I mean, what was crazy is that we were putting out so much, and we saw the race narrow after Kamala Harris became the candidate.
But for me, it always tightened up at Trump plus two and just stayed there.
And all of my polling showed that he was going to do good in the swing states, winning almost all of them every single time.
And public opinion does change a lot rapidly, many times.
Just look at Pierre Polyev.
But what it doesn't change about is Trump.
Because once you've decided to support Trump, you're pretty much there.
Like you've pretty much gone through the process, in my opinion.
After 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, and 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.
And they came back.
I think I shamed them back into hurting at the end to be a little bit less inaccurate, but they were doing everything in their power, in my opinion, to try and get Kamala Harris.
There were Harris plus six polls, and she lost the national popular vote.
And 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.
We had Trump winning five out of six swing states.
The sixth one was a top toss-up.
And everybody calls us a right-leaning pollster, but no, in our swing states, we were actually a little bit too left, believe it or not, almost the full point.
So there it is.
There are no right-wing pollsters.
There are accurate ones and left-wing establishment shills.
Yeah, I think that is true.
I found a tremendous tendency, particularly right after they dumped Biden and they anointed Kamala Harris.
By 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.
Just a little reminder I had to throw in there.
But 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.
Virtually every poll when I got into the crosstabs, I found them oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans.
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.
Well, 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 you didn't have to go out and work to raise a crowd.
All you had to do was announce that he was coming, and you would be guaranteed a full house.
In fact, an overflow crowd.
Yet they even tried to claim that he was having trouble filling his rally halls, which, of course, was never, ever the case.
Let'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.
What's going on here?
Well, it's another psychological operation, just like back in September.
They have arrayed everything in their power to take out the anti-establishment candidate.
It's really interesting if 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.
But, you know, he had his first presidency and then added votes.
And then I think won a second time and then added votes.
And he keeps adding votes and he keeps adding support.
And they're all they're left with, they don't have political power now.
So they're trying this disgusting mean girls tactic of, again, trying to convince everybody that Trump's not cool.
Now, 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% approval rating like they did George W. Bush.
It's not going to happen.
But he's doing pretty well.
I had him at 48% today.
Totally underwater two points.
Totally different than the negative 13, negative 14 points.
But what's crazy is you can look at RealClear politics and see they essentially planned this as a media hit.
That ABC headline, Trump's the worst 100-day polling in 80 years.
I 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.
And it's like CNN, CBS, you know, 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 RealClear politics aggregate just to get those headlines.
Really 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.
And they're so like the crosstabs immediately tell you they're so scummy.
If you look at the ABC one, they have Trump underwater six points on the issue of immigration.
That's like Louisville.
In my numbers, 65% of America supports Trump's massive deportation programs.
And he's getting rated well on all these issues, even the economy.
We had Trump at a 46% 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.
And so this whole scenario where every single pollster structurally shows that Trump does worse, it's all fake.
It'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.
And 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.
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
I could not agree more.
I was looking at the crosstabs in the New York Times Sienna poll.
According to that poll, 37% of the people in the sample voted for Donald Trump.
Ridiculous.
It's a very small poll, too.
It's only like 700 people.
It's like really small.
They have a massive budget.
And not only that, their independents lean 17 points Democrat.
Like, my numbers don't look like that.
Then there's the NPR PBS mayorish poll.
Like, I would believe anything they published.
Please give me a break.
It's pretty laughable.
One thing I am curious about is voter attitudes about continued aid to Ukraine, voter attitudes about the war in Ukraine, the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Based on the data that you've seen, your own data and data of others, are Americans content to continue to shovel millions, if not billions of dollars more to Ukraine?
This is a tough one because there are, listen, there's some things that the Americans immediately see through.
They overwhelmingly suspected that COVID came from Wuhan way back in 21.
And even half of them think that it was purposely released by China.
And yet at the same time, they also are very susceptible to sort of like patriotism, former neoconservative, pro-interventionalist media attacks.
And I think that that's something that really did happen because everybody hated Putin.
They wanted America to really like intervene to stop this thing.
And what's happened is over time, those numbers have absolutely abated.
And we've been asking the question very many times, who's winning?
Russia or Ukraine?
And really what's happened is the numbers have gotten up to basically half think it's a stalemate.
And is the United States doing too much or not enough to help Ukraine fight the Russian invasion?
34% say too much, 39% say not enough.
And obviously there's a party difference, but not as much as you'd think.
And ultimately, voters trust Trump more than they trusted Biden or Harris on this issue, but, you know, by a couple of points.
Ultimately, though, you know, we're just in an entirely different political context.
Half Think It's Stalemate00:03:19
You might appreciate this question.
We've asked it many times.
Who is the biggest enemy that the United States currently faces?
And we put North Korea, Iran, Russia, you know, China, all the normal actors.
Then we put the Democrat Party and the Republican Party also.
And 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.
And if you look at Russia, it's like 12%.
North Korea and Iran are in middle single digits.
And so I think this really reflects part of the Trump movement in that Americans might have an opinion about Ukraine or Israel or whatever, but 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 your future.
I mean, we have numbers in the low 30s of people who say that they're better off than they were four years ago.
And only 22% say today's children will have it better off than their parents.
Those are existential problems for our republic.
And at the end of the day, Ukraine, I don't think, just captures the share of mind.
We have about two and a half minutes left in this segment.
A technical question.
With the advent of cell phones, with the advent of the internet, with fewer and fewer people having hardline phones in their home, and 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.
How do you go about making sure that you are getting a sample that is an accurate reflection of the electorate?
That's true.
And people have tackled the problem different ways.
What most mainstream media organizations are doing is piling into these really limited panels of only 50, 60, 70,000 people like the Ipsos panel and the YouGov panel.
We still do robo-dialing landline calling for a little bit less than half of our polls because 90 million people still have them and we have 400,000 people that like to answer our polling.
But then we go to online panels and those are tougher.
You pay people to take the response and you never really know who's on the other end of it.
But it's mostly because our money comes not from a boss, not from a political party, not from dark money NGOs.
It comes from subscribers and advertisers.
So at the end of the day, I want to be accurate or our business won't exist.
It really is a matter of will.
It really comes down to that.
And 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, but you haven't seen them get any better.
So at a certain point, it ultimately comes down to will.
In 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.
I don't know, but there will always be election prediction.
And I think that we're reaching more people than almost everybody.
And we haven't even needed to go to cell phone yet, although we will at some point.
But you raise an interesting question at the end of the day with so many scammers out there.
The 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.
Rural Health Care Access00:00:56
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our nation has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.