Weekly "State of the Nation" poll put out by Daily Kos. You'll notice that everyone except for Obama and every group has a higher unfavorable percentage than favorable.
At the end of the day, though, I find most political opinion polls completely worthless. It's all about the wording of the questions, which always manages to skew them in some way. If the question was "How do you feel about what the current Congress has accomplished so far?", I bet you'd see different results.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
From the crosstabs (here)
For favorability questions, respondents are asked: "Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of _______?"
Your question is a completely different question. So of course it would yield a different polling outcome.
Exactly, my question is completely different. But liberal-biased polling organizations would never use a question like mine. Instead, they ask questions like, "Do you believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist?" (PPP), with the explicit intent of compromising legitimate conservative opinions by displaying only the opinion of radicals.
You implied that the result would be different because of a bias of the organization. But how is "Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of _______?" in any way biased, liberal or conservative?
Also, the same poll that asked about the anti-christ also asked if people believed Bush was responsible for 9/11. That position is consistently one that makes a subset of the Democratic party look outrageous. Go back and crunch the numbers and you'll see that many more Democrats are truthers than Republicans believe Obama is the anti-Christ. I chose to headline the fact that a bunch of Republicans believe Obama is the anti-Christ because I felt that it was funny and rightly raised a point about some conservative opposition to Obama. If Lachlan posted the same poll, saying that about 40% of New Jersey Democrats are truthers, he would've been completely right!
Certainly I have an agenda in what I highlight. But you dismissing the poll because it contains uncomfortable information is not the right way to go about this. I might bury the lede on the Democrats who are truthers, but I'm not going to deny the quality of the poll on that alone. The question, from a methodological standpoint, is legitimate. Just because you don't like what it asks doesn't mean it's somehow an unscientific polling question.
Post a Comment