Radio Days, Zogby, and Rasmussen

In the 1990s, during the last decade of my career in the public welfare business, I supervised several counties and my duties required me to spend a lot of time on the highway, driving from office to office. That was when I started listening to AM talk radio, since those were the signals I could pick up clearly no matter where I was on my route. I'd listen to the sports talk station during football season, and the so-called "news talk" station the rest of the time. In those days, the afternoon news talk lineup was Rush Limbaugh, followed by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. Sean Hannity hadn't yet surfaced as a national AM radio hotshot.

Limbaugh, America's anal cyst, devoted nearly every minute (that I was listening) to tirades about the latest Clinton administration scandal or screwup. During those years, I first heard about the Zogby Poll. Rush liked to hype the latest Zogby poll results because they almost invariably differed from the better-known national polls, e.g., Gallup, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, New York Times, or Washington Post.

In the Zogby poll, Clinton's job approval rating was usually lower than in concurrent national polls, and other measurements (at least those discussed on Limbaugh's show) always seemed to support broad public approval of the agenda Limbaugh and the conservatives were pushing at the moment. In simple terms, a Zogby poll was almost always bad news for Clinton and the Democrats, good news for Rush and the GOP.

Back then I didn't have a computer at home, and the one in my office wasn't connected to the internet. Even if it had been, I wouldn't have had time to use it. I almost never watched news programs on TV, so whatever I knew about national affairs came from the local newspaper, a magazine like Time or Newsweek, and Limbaugh's AM radio program. In the 90s, I didn't consider every minute spent listening to Rush as a minute of precious life wasted since I was out in the car anyway and it was either him or C&W music.

After retirement, I continued listening to AM radio some afternoons, mostly from force of habit and not as regularly as during the driving days. In 2001, I bought my first Mac and gradually began to follow current events on the web. Bush replaced Clinton, and the Zogby Poll results began to be less favorable to the GOP for some reason. Limbaugh started trying to discredit Zogby after years of claiming his results were the only ones that were reliable and accurate.

It looks like the right-wingers have found a new poll refuge. The Rasmussen Report has replaced Zogby as the survey that's near-and-dear to the hearts of every hardcore conservative in America. If things look bad for Obama in Gallup, count on them looking worse for him in Rasmussen. Any time a conservative is dancing joyfully, the glee probably originated with that day's daily tracking poll numbers. I don't know if Zogby had an agenda in the nineties or if Rasmussen has one now, but polling organizations can't buy the kind of good publicity that accompanies reports of a Democratic presidency going down the crapper.