Please chime in on this if you spend any time observing Scott Rasmussen’s polling methods, because it’s of critical importance to the Massachusetts Senate special election:  why did Rasmussen deliberately not mention “Joe Kennedy” when polling the race?

Joe Kennedy is running as the Libertarian candidate.

He is not one of the horse-toothed, entitled, would-be “American royalty” Kennedys, though with a name like “Joe Kennedy”, absolutely NO ONE we know believes he’s NOT one of the Hyannis Port crowd.  Everyone who we’ve spoken to in Massachusetts believes Joe Kennedy is either Ted Kennedy’s son, grandson, or nephew.

We believe there’s going to be a lot of muscle-memory voting for “Joe Kennedy” from older Democrats who are so used to pulling the Kennedy lever for “the Kennedy seat” all these years.  Great Merciful Zeus, it is a struck of fortuitous dumb luck a man named Joe Kennedy is running in this race and on the ballot.  Even though he is a Republican, we believe he will take more votes away from Democrat Martha Coakley than he will from Republican Scott Brown.  The votes he’ll get from Coakley are from the elderly, the confused, and the low-information voters who believe they’re just voting for Kennedy again.

Well, they will be, but it’s not THOSE Kennedys.

We are truly stumped as to why Rasmussen phrased their Massachusetts poll this way:

“Who do you favor for U.S. Senate? Scott Brown, Martha Coakley, Some other candidate, or Not Sure?”

Rasmussen chose not to include “Joe Kennedy” in that mix, but instead phrased it as “some other candidate”.  Why?

Martha Coakley refused to do any debates with Scott Brown unless Joe Kennedy was on the dais too — we think because she wanted the opportunity to reiterate that Joe Kennedy is not one of the cover-up-murder-and-rape-Kennedys.  Coakley is beginning to realize, perhaps too late, that many Democrats are going to vote “Kennedy” and not for her, not because they want a Libertarian to win, but because voting “Kennedy” is the thing we were trained to do for years by the unions, and there isn’t enough time to undo this now.

We can’t think of a single valid reason Rasmussen chose to go the “some other candidate route”. It’s a big head-scratcher.

We think that if Kennedy was polled by name, that Scott Brown (aka, Hottie McAwesome) would have actually won the poll.  He’s just 9 points behind Coakley in this race now, and we think a “Kennedy” on the ballot will snatch at least a good 6 points more from Coakley than “some other candidate” would.  A point or two would also be won by Brown in that instance, because there are those in Massachusetts who would probably vote Republican instead of Democrat in an attempt to keep a third-party Kennedy from somehow winning the race (since, despite the Kennedys best efforts to the contrary, the people of Massachusetts do not wish to remain forever serfs in “Camelot”).

Did Rasmussen do this on purpose for some reason?

We know we asked this yesterday, but what impact do you think “Joe Kennedy” on the ballot will really have, especially since so few in Massachusetts seem aware an actual election is happening on January 19th?

Our logic is this:  if they are so ill-informed that they don’t even know there’s voting to be had, the people who wander into polling places that day won’t have any idea “Joe Kennedy” is not who they think he is, and we bet a great many of them will blind Kennedy-vote as usual, throwing the race to Scott Brown, whose supporters ARE highly informed and motivated to vote in this race (because he is, as we’ve repeatedly noted, HOTTIE McAWESOME).

What think you?