It is hard to understand why voters vote, perhaps because their are a variety of issues and emotions that influence elections. And then there is spin–which has little regard for data as it tries to convince us of an ideological “truth.”

New polling results McClatchy Newspapers reported by Steven Thomma suggest that the midterm elections were not a mandate on specific policies.

“A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether. Continue reading »

All political eyes are focused on the U.S. Senate Race here in Washington state. Will 3-term Patty Murray–a Democrat–be beaten by the two-time Gubernatorial loser Republican Dino Rossi?
Friday, October 08, 2010– www.rasmussenreports.com leads with this header:
Washington Senate: Rossi (R) Inches Ahead of Murray (D)

First line: Republican challenger Dino Rossi has edged slightly ahead of incumbent Democrat Patty Murray in Washington’s U.S. Senate race.

They provide their data:
A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Washington shows Rossi with 49% of the vote, while Murray’s support stands at 46%. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and two percent (2%) are undecided.

Unfortunately, their poll has a 4 percent margin of error. This means that there needs to be more than a 4 percent difference in order to draw a statistically sound conclusion that one is actually ahead (and there is still a 5% chance of being wrong). These polling results are too close to call–and that is what should have been reported if Rasmussen were being honest about this. Continue reading »

POLL September 28, 2010

Executive Summary
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. Continue reading »

From Pew:

May 11, 2010

Q. On “news” sites, one reads daily that “43% surveyed think this,” or “72% of ….name the group” are doing this. Yet, when one performs due diligence, the statistic recedes into non-importance, because so many surveys involve, say, 1,146 respondents. With a population approaching 300 million, how can any responsible news source report such insignificant data?

A lot of people share your skepticism about sampling. It is not intuitively easy to grasp how a very small sample of a very large population can be accurate. But pollsters have a stock (if smart-alec) reply: If you don’t believe in random sampling, ask your doctor to take all of your blood next time you need a blood test. Indeed, sampling is used in many fields — by accountants looking for fraud, medical researchers, even manufacturers doing quality control checks on their products. The key for survey sampling is that every person in the population (in our case, adults living in the U.S.) has a chance of being included, and that pollsters have a way to calculate that chance. Our samples are constructed in such a way that nearly every telephone in the U.S. — cell phones as well as landlines — has an equal chance of being included. This permits us to put a margin of likely error on our findings and to say how confident we are in the result. Continue reading »

On March 25, 2010, the Politicker blog on CNN  posted a story that lead with the headline:

Polls indicate support for health care reform up since vote

They offer this quick summary: “According to new polls, support for the health care reform bill has increased as a result of Sunday’s approval the legislation by the House.”

The article provided this information:

 “Two of the surveys, by CBS News and Quinnipiac University, asked virtually the same question about health care both before and after Sunday’s vote, and in both polls support for the legislation rose by four to five percentage points.”

….

“CBS asked what Americans thought of “the current health care reform bill.” Quinnipiac asked what Americans thought of “the changes in health care passed by Congress.” These questions concentrated on the ‘contents’ of the bill. CBS indicated 42 percent approving of the bill; Quinnipiac indicated 40 percent approval. Forty-six percent of those questioned in the CBS poll disapproved of the bill, with 49 percent of those questioned by Quinnipiac disapproving of the legislation.”

 They do not provide any comparison before and after. Maybe they forgot. But we readers have no way of knowing whether the “increase” was within sampling error.  If the sampling error on the polls is the traditional +/-3 percent, there would have to be more than 6%  difference to be outside of the range of just sampling error. But they do not provide any detail about the size of the samples or the sampling error, or the prior survey results.

 The main problem with this article, however, is the spin. We are left with the impression that people are now OK with the health bill that the House passed it.  But when you look at the reported data, less than a majority approve of this bill and almost half the people disapproved of the bill. The reasons likely vary–some disapprove because they don’t think government should be in the health care insurance business, they fear it will increase their costs, or they dislike the idea of mandates and IRS being the enforcers, while others dissappove because it did not provide a government option or did not create a single-payer system.

What is clear, however, –at least from my interpretation of this data–is that the American people remain divided on this legislation, despite the positive spin.

 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/25/polls-indicate-support-for-health-care-reform-has-increased-since-sunday-vote/?fbid=f2p5JbqQ-b–

Once again we see a great deal of agreement about a public policy issue, challenging the image of a fractured society based on political party or conservative-liberal ideology.  The support for limiting corporate spending was strong across the board, no matter how the data was compared.

A February SurveyUSA poll (www.surveyusa.com) showed that Americans across all political views favor limiting corporate spending in elections.  78% stated that corporations should be limited and 70% believe that have had too much influence in elections. A whopping 87% believe that corporations rescued financially by the federal government and 82% believe that corporations doing business with the federal government should be limited in how much they spend to support or oppose a candidate for public office.

 While the agreement on these questions were often within the margin of error when comparing political party identification and conservative-liberal views (although on a few questions, a higher percentage of Independents supported limits), the thing that struck me were the differences by region. While 70% overall believed that the corporations had too much influence, people in the west weighed in at 84%. While 61% overall believed that Congress has done too little to regulate how much influence corporations have over elections, people in the west weighed in at 77%.  Similarly, while 78% overall said corporations should be limited in how much they spend, 91% of the western people favored limitations.

Continue reading »