In a year-end review of polling and politics, one of America’s leading national pollsters, Scott Rasmussen, says most Americans have higher priorities than politics. And he says partisan thinking about race, particularly among Democrats, hasn’t kept up with demographic realities.

Marc Ang: What is the state of polling today?

Rasmussen: “People think polls they agree with are brilliant and polls they disagree with are horrible. We made special efforts to reach [rural people and those] without a college, degree because they take surveys less. If you took out all the operator-assisted big-media polls from the RealClear average for 2020, the average was pretty close. It was the analysis that was bad [in 2016, not the polls]. Nobody thought about the margin of error going in the other direction. Using a poll with a three-point margin of error to pick a one-point race is stupid. [Choosing a range] is a more honest way of looking at it, being a little less precise, like I did with the Burgess Owens race.”

Ang:  How closely does the average person even follow politics?

Rasmussen: “Eight to 10% talk about politics every day, people who live and breathe it. I think it’s healthy that people have more important things to do in their lives. Real-world things rather than political things, eventually seep into the political world every now and then [like Afghanistan and the embarrassment of leaving Americans behind], which accelerated Biden’s decline. The numbers shifted in polling right after.

“What Afghanistan did was shake the perception of Joe Biden as the ‘adults back of the room’. We voted him in for his foreign policy knowledge because he wasn’t Trump. What will last is the illusion of competence is gone. Every time something else goes wrong, it will reinforce [the perception, such as increasing gas prices].”

Ang: Are Texas, Arizona and Georgia trending away from Republicans?