That poll created by wingnut John Ziegler purporting to demonstrate that Obama voters were misinformed by the mainstream media about Barack Obama and Joe Biden (and defended so scatalogically by Ziegler) has been examined by objective polling experts beyond Nate Silver now, and the verdict is unanimous:

Wall Street Journal:

"..Interpreted the numbers from the survey in a misleading fashion."

Pollster.com:

The Zogby summary quotes Ziegler claiming that "the poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace."

The problem, as Silver points out, is that the survey does no such thing. It proves only that Obama voters surveyed were less likely to attribute to Obama or Biden a half dozen statements that were "at best debatable, yet apparently represented as factual to the respondent" ...

... Describing his biased, leading questions as a legitimate test of knowledge is hugely misleading, at best.

Even John Zogby himself is running from this survey, claiming it was put together while he was on vacation. While paying lip service to its ostensible validity, he adds:

“I also believe it was not our finest hour. This slipped through the cracks. It came out critical only of Obama voters.”

Worth noting, however: Everyone seems in agreement that this was not a "push poll" in the strict sense of the term, but rather was in a similar vein of being a misleading survey deployed for partisan political purposes.

Ziegler himself has posted a rambling, incoherent defense that attempted to answer the chief issue -- the factual invalidity/dubiousness of many of his questions -- thus:

These questions were carefully chosen to try and identify which news stories broke through the clutter and reached the average Obama voter. Ironically, one of the main reasons that the questions enrage the left is that many of the questions were based on news stories that the left-wing media ignored. In other words, because the left-wing ignored the negative aspects of Obama's past, they weren't reported and therefore weren't significant (or didn't really happen)and so any mention of them is evidence of a right-wing agenda lacking in credibility. Holy circular argument Batman!!

Many left-wing blogs (and many of the thousands of e-mail I have recieved from their readers) are absolutely obsessed with trying to prove that the wording of certian questions was not 100% accurate, as if that would have made any difference at all except in the case of the question about Russia.

Actually, as we already pointed out, the questions were far from 100 percent accurate, and in many cases were nearly 100 percent inaccurate:

Continue reading »

Download | Play    Download | Play

I'm sure it was just a coincidence that on the day that Barack Obama met with George W. Bush at the White House to discuss the transition to power, polls came out showing that Bush was leaving office more unpopular than Richard Nixon:

On the day that President-elect Barack Obama is visiting the White House, a new national poll suggests that the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first sought more than six decades ago.

Seventy-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday disapprove of how President Bush is handling his job.

That's an all-time high in CNN polling and in Gallup polling dating back to World War II.

In contrast, Barack Obama enters office with a 68 percent approval rating. (Bush, for those wondering, entered office in January 2001 with approval ratings around 55 percent.)

What's remarkable about these numbers, though, is that they tell us large numbers of Republicans -- indeed, McCain voters -- are voicing disapproval of Bush's performance.

These fresh-born critics have essentially two options to explain away Bush without indicting themselves:

-- He was incompetent.

-- He wasn't conservative enough.

Often the critics will combine the two, but usually emphasize one or the other. And the current rift within conservative ranks revolves around one or the other. But there's a big hole in their rationale.

As we've pointed out repeatedly, the Great Repudiation last Tuesday was the product of voters rejecting movement conservatism -- both its governance and its politics.

The reasons George W. Bush is so unpopular is not merely that he was incompetent, but that he enacted so many policies, and as a result presided over so many disasters, that were a direct product of movement-conservative dogma. Ironically, it wasn't until they had proven disastrous that many of these Republicans suddenly realized he wasn't competent or conservative enough.

I guess you can't blame movement conservatives for their utter state of denial about the reasons for their repudiation. Yet it is satisfying to know that this denial will handicap them for the foreseeable future.

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a poll in which literally not a single person answers a certain way, especially on an issue like the economy.

The latest Pew Survey on News Consumption, which is conducted every other year, was released yesterday, and is chock full of interesting tidbits and results. Most notably, there was a great section of the report on news-consumer knowledge and sophistication.

About half of Americans (53%) can correctly identify the Democrats as the party that has a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 2007, shortly after the Democrats gained control of the House after a dozen years of GOP rule, many more people (76%) knew the Democrats held the majority.

The public is less familiar with the secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice) and the prime minister of Great Britain (Gordon Brown). About four-in-ten (42%) can name Rice as the current secretary of state. The public’s ability to identify Rice has not changed much over recent years: In April 2006 and December 2004, shortly before she was sworn in, 43% could correctly identify her.

The prime minister of Great Britain is not well known among the public. Just more than a quarter (28%) can correctly identify Gordon Brown as the leader of Great Britain.

Overall, 18% of the public is able to correctly answer all three political knowledge questions, while a third (33%) do not know the answer to any of the questions.

I’ll admit, I’m torn about how humiliating this is to the nation overall. For the typical American not to know Gordon Brown strikes me as only mildly distressing — Brown has only been Prime Minister for about a year, and most of the public was probably more familiar with Tony Blair.

But one-in-three Americans got all of the questions wrong. For all the talk about the Democratic Congress, barely half the country knows there’s a Democratic majority.

Maybe my perspective is skewed because I just finished reading Rick Shenkman’s “Just How Stupid Are We?” but at a certain point, the political world is going to have to come to grips with the fact that a striking percentage of the electorate has no idea what’s going on.

As for the other results from the Pew survey, it was also interesting to note which news consumers did better than others.

Continue reading »

   For quite a while, there were certain trends that political observers were simply supposed to accept as fact: Barack Obama would struggle to win support from Latino voters. And Jewish voters. And working-class, low-income voters. These were obvious “truths” that “everyone” knew.

Except none of these observations are holding up well. Obama is doing very well with Latino voters, Jewish voters, and according to a new Washington Post report, working-class, low-income voters.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation’s low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.

Obama’s advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. But even among white workers — a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November — Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.

Let’s not brush past this point too quickly — among low-income whites, Obama leads McCain by 10. To be sure, about one in six of the white workers remains uncommitted, but at least for now, Obama seems to have a sizable lead with a constituency that was rumored to be a lost cause up until fairly recently.

Greg Sargent concluded, “If this poll is accurate, McCain is dramatically under-performing among these voters. Will we be hearing a ‘McCain’s working class whites problem’ meme anytime soon?”

Given the data, it’s hardly an unreasonable argument to make.

  AmericaBlog:

The trend of the tracking polls hasn't been good of late. Rasmussen, which is a quite reputable poll, has Obama and McCain tied today -- and with leaners (basically people who haven't made up their minds, but are forced to choose for the poll), McCain is up by one point. This is the first time that McCain has tied or beaten Obama in the poll, Obama has always been up. Not anymore:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when "leaners" are included, it's McCain 47% and Obama 46%.

This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3 (see recent daily results).

I've had a bad feeling about the direction of the campaign for the past couple weeks. We've been saying for months that McCain and the GOP would go negative, very negative. No surprise. That is what's happening. Karl Rove and his crew are at their best destroying people and they're running the show now. The latest tracking polls seem to indicate that McCain's negative attacks are having an impact. The corollary is that Obama's response hasn't been working, or at least it hasn't been enough. That needs to change, fast.

Granted, this is a national tracking poll and, as we've written many times, this election is about the states, because it is. I'll be monitoring FiveThirtyEight.com for any movement on the state polls.

For those who think it's too early to be worried, here's some historical perspective: the first Swift Boat ad attacking John Kerry was launched on August 5, 2004.

Cenk Uygur has some suggestions for Obama to break the stalemate:

Instead, right now the only conversation is about whether Obama is qualified to be president or not. I think McCain's ads in this regard have been comical. They have flat-out sucked. But that doesn't matter. Because the only thing that matters is the conversation itself.

If Obama doesn't change the topic, he gives up an enormous advantage he has, which is the American people are grossly dissatisfied with the Republican Party (even the chairman of the NRCC is telling Republican Congressman to run away from their own party). Make the election about Republicans.

Secondly, Obama has not attacked at all. This is the same mistake Kerry made. He could have pounded Bush for all of his mistakes; instead he hardly laid a glove on him because he wanted to run a positive campaign. That's ridiculous.[..]

Should Obama go after McCain for voting with Bush 95% of time last year and 100% of the time this year? He would be an absolute idiot if he doesn't. Who cares about the nuances? That's not what voters remember. They'll remember that McCain voted with Bush almost all of the time, for whatever reason.

Obama wins simply by having this conversation. If the question is -- does John McCain blindly follow George Bush -- Obama doesn't even need to win that debate. He wins simply by having that debate. What is stuck in people's mind is how much McCain voted with Bush.

  I can appreciate how difficult it must be for a news outlet like the Associated Press to find new and interesting things to write about when it comes to the presidential campaign. For that matter, I can even appreciate that, once in a while, a story with a human-interest angle might help break things up a bit.

But as part of my ongoing fascination with the AP’s awful coverage of the campaign, I’m afraid this item is just silly.

If the presidential election goes to the dogs, John McCain is looking like best in show.

From George Washington’s foxhound “Drunkard” to George W. Bush’s terriers “Barney” and “Miss Beazley,” pets are a longtime presidential tradition for which the presumed Republican nominee seems well prepared, with more than a dozen.

The apparent Democratic nominee Barack Obama, on the other hand, doesn’t have a pet at home. The pet-owning public seems to have noticed the difference. An AP-Yahoo! News poll found that pet owners favor McCain over Obama 42 percent to 37 percent, with dog owners particularly in McCain’s corner.

The AP quoted one person saying, “I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person — caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners,” and found another willing to argue on the record that if a person owns a pet that “tells you that they’re responsible at least for something, for the care of something.”

This poll and related story are even worse than the usual palaver. Mark Blumenthal has the definitive take-down.

  ...previously held by himself.

LaTimes:

The survey found public approval of the president's job performance at a new low for a Times/Bloomberg poll: 23%, compared with 73% disapproval.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

It’s hard to characterize these results on the racial/political landscape as encouraging.

As Sen. Barack Obama opens his campaign as the first African American on a major party presidential ticket, nearly half of all Americans say race relations in the country are in bad shape and three in 10 acknowledge feelings of racial prejudice, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. […]

Overall, 51 percent call the current state of race relations “excellent” or “good,” about the same as said so five years ago. That is a relative thaw from more negative ratings in the 1990s, but the gap between whites and blacks on the issue is now the widest it has been in polls dating to early 1992.

More than six in 10 African Americans now rate race relations as “not so good” or “poor,” while 53 percent of whites hold more positive views. Opinions are also divided along racial lines, though less so, on whether blacks face discrimination. There is more similarity on feelings of personal racial prejudice: Thirty percent of whites and 34 percent of blacks admit such sentiments.

Nearly nine in 10 whites said they would be comfortable with a black president, suggesting there are quite a few white voters who harbor feelings of racial prejudice but would accept Obama anyway, or there are quite a few white voters who are lying to pollsters about their comfort with a black president. (It’s worth clarifying only two-thirds of whites would be “entirely comfortable” with a black president, meaning about a quarter of whites say they’re comfortable with the idea, but they’re not thrilled by the idea. I’m going to guess these are the whites most likely to be lying.)

Some wanted to see the silver lining of these results.

Continue reading »

This week, high-profile Republicans, many of whom had opposed coastal drilling, enthusiastically reversed course and began demanding that coastal drilling begin immediately. This was especially jarring in Florida, where Gov. Charlie Crist and Sen. Mel Martinez — both Republicans who had opposed offshore drilling as recently as last week — came out in support of the Bush/McCain policy.

It appears that the GOP is just following the political winds. Drilling, all of a sudden, is enjoying broader public support.

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey — conducted before McCain announced his intentions on the issue — finds that 67% of voters believe that drilling should be allowed off the coasts of California, Florida and other states. Only 18% disagree and 15% are undecided. Conservative and moderate voters strongly support this approach, while liberals are more evenly divided (46% of liberals favor drilling, 37% oppose).

Sixty-four percent (64%) of voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that gas prices will go down if offshore oil drilling is allowed, although 27% don’t believe it. Seventy-eight percent (78%) of conservatives say offshore drilling is at least somewhat likely to drive prices down. That view is shared by 57% of moderates and 50% of liberal voters.

The Rasmussen poll comes around the same time as a Gallup poll that found a similar result: “Fifty-seven percent of Americans favor allowing oil drilling in coastal and wilderness areas that are currently off-limits. Forty-one percent of Americans oppose allowing drilling in those areas, and 2 percent have no opinion.”

So, is this a political problem for opponents of coastal and ANWR drilling? Perhaps, but it seems easy enough to move the needle in the other direction.

Continue reading »

Great news coming out of my alma mata Quinnipiac today as a new poll shows Obama leading McCain for the first time in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Of course polls at this point mean relatively little, but the overall trend is very encouraging, as we see Democrats starting to rally around Barack and Independents moving away from McCain.

Quinnipiac:

With strong support from women, blacks and younger voters, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the apparent Democratic presidential contender, leads Arizona Sen. John McCain, expected to be the Republican candidate, among likely voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to simultaneous Quinnipiac University Swing State polls released today.

This is the first time Sen. Obama has led in all three states. No one has been elected President since 1960 without taking two of these three largest swing states in the Electoral College. Results from the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University polls show:

* Florida: Obama edges McCain 47 - 43 percent;
* Ohio: Obama tops McCain 48 - 42 percent;
* Pennsylvania: Obama leads McCain 52 - 40 percent.

Again, 4+ months out, the usual caveats still apply, but the overall trends and CW-busting observations are wonderful to see, especially in Florida, which for a while seemed out of reach for Obama. As fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver puts it:

If Florida is in play, then John McCain's defense is completely broken; it was the one traditional swing state that always had looked off-limits to Obama. More frustratingly for McCain, he had spent the better part of three days in Florida earlier this month, hoping to raise doubts about Obama among Jewish voters. Although Quinnipiac does not break out the Jewish vote, Obama holds a 61-31 lead in Southeast Florida, where most of the state's Jewish population is concentrated.

All of the usual caveats apply — we’re still five months away from the general election, and the landscape will change; national polls offer minimal predictive value this far out; and a presidential race is a state-by-state contest. With all of that in mind, though, it’s nevertheless helpful to consider national polls for their general trends, and to offer some sense of voters’ attitudes, especially now that we’re down to a one-on-one campaign.

And right now, it looks like Barack Obama is in reasonably good shape. From the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll:

Obama leads McCain among registered voters, 47 to 41 percent, which is outside the poll’s margin of error. In the previous NBC/Journal survey, released in late April, Obama was ahead by three points, 46-43 percent.

In the head-to-head matchup, Obama leads McCain among African Americans (83-7 percent), Hispanics (62-28), women (52-33), Catholics (47-40), independents (41-36) and even blue-collar workers (47-42). Obama is also ahead among those who said they voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries (61-19).

Obama leads by seven among white women (46-39), a key swing demographic. What’s more, Americans say they prefer change to experience by a wide margin, and as one of the pollsters behind the survey noted, people just don’t see McCain as an agent of change: “Voters are not convinced that McCain represents the change they want and that he’ll be all that different from Bush.”

For that matter, Americans actually seem to expect an Obama presidency. Putting aside preferences, poll respondents were asked which candidate they thought would win. It wasn’t even close — 54% predict an Obama win, while only 30% said the same of McCain.

So, if all of these factors are leaning in Obama’s favor, why is he only up by six? Because McCain is doing extremely well with white men, leading Obama by 20 points (55-35). White men make up 40% of the electorate, so this makes a big difference. And while Obama leads among women of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, McCain enjoys an edge among white suburban women (44-38).

Nevertheless, one of the numbers that jumped out at me was an “enthusiasm gap.”

Continue reading »

After a long and arduous process, the Democratic Party finally has a presidential nominee, and this will no doubt capture the attention of the nation.

But it's probably worth keeping in mind that the Dems have reason to be excited about congressional races, too.

Democratic pollsters released what they characterized as a “dramatic” survey showing the possibility of a Democratic wave in Republican congressional districts this fall.

The poll of 1600 voters in 45 Republican congressional districts showed on average a 33% approval rating for President Bush, a 38% approval rating for the incumbent Republican and a strong desire for change.

In the 45 Republican districts the poll found 55% of people said they wanted to vote for a Democrat for Congress, compared to 49% in January. Just 37% of respondents said they would vote for their Republican incumbents, who were named.

“What’s stunning about this is not just that the race has moved over the last three months,” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. “There’s no reason to believe this won’t continue to move.” He is a founder of Democracy Corps, a non-profit that conducted the poll.

A wave started rolling in 2006 ... and it's not done yet.

What a shocker. A new Gallup poll finds that a large majority of Americans support meeting with leaders of foreign countries who are considered our enemies.

Just more proof that John McCain and the Republican party are wildly out of touch with the majority of Americans.

Make sure to read the entire article, as it confirms what many in the elite press don't want you to believe.

I genuinely believed, foolishly, that one of the unintended side benefits of the media’s fascination with Jeremiah Wright is that no one, anywhere, could still possibly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. After all, everyone in the country got to see a whole lot of Obama’s Christian pastor and his Christian church. Sure, there are some uninformed people out there, and some willfully ignorant people who simply choose not to accept reality, but generally speaking, it’s hard to imagine more than a handful of voters buying this foolishness.

And yet, the polls have been discouraging. The most recent Newsweek poll found that 11% of the public still thinks Obama is a Muslim. An NYT/CBS poll put the number at 7%. The Pew Forum found 10%.

As disappointing as this is, however, Ben Smith provided some interesting context to public confusion.

One relevant piece of context: Large minorities of Americans consistently say they hold wildly out-of-the-mainstream views, often specifically discredited beliefs. In some cases, those views should make them pretty profoundly alienated from one party or the other.

For instance:

22 percent believe President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.
30 percent believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
23 percent believe they’ve been in the presence of a ghost.
18 percent believe the sun revolves around the Earth.

In other words, if about one-in-10 voters buy into the nonsense about Obama, it’s still a reasonably low number, compared to some other widely-held misconceptions.

I’m just not sure, from a political perspective, whether this is reassuring or not.

Continue reading »