Polls: Media Leading Democrats Over a Cliff
Now hear this: the country opposes the war
By Robert A. Hahn Posted in 2008 | ballistic response | feedback loop | runaway servo — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
It often happens that liberal reporters, in their zeal to proselytize on behalf of Democrats, trumpet the Democrats' talking points so loudly that the Democrats themselves come to believe their own BS. The liberal line blares from every pore in the media. It must therefore be true. This phenomenon has led to numerous gravity checks for the Democrats.
Some new polls, and the coverage of them by the Associated Press, suggest that another face plant is on the way.
Listen to this, from AP reporter Alan Fram:
Republican angst over the war in Iraq may be helping fuel John McCain's rise as a top presidential contender, even though he has been the campaign's highest profile supporter of the unpopular conflict...
Hear that? As every Democrat knows — indeed, as Alan Fram knows — the Iraq War is an "unpopular conflict." It does not seem to occur to Mr. Fram, or to any of the Democrats running for President, that if the war's unpopularity is fueling John McCain's rise, then something Democrats know about the war must not be true.
McCain's support is stronger among voters saying they disapprove of the war than among those who approve, according to polls of voters in the two early primary states where the war's popularity was measured.
What's up with that? Has McCain suddenly become the darling of the antiwar left? Not very likely. Here's Alan Fram again:
Even when only looking at voters identifying themselves as Republican — omitting independents, who tend to be more negative about the war — those differences were the same or sharper.
The "differences" Fram is referring to concern the McCain/Romney split in Michigan and New Hampshire. McCain did best among those who disapprove of the war. That result was not limited to Republicans. As Fram notes, but seems to ignore, the same phenomenon occurred among independents.
These results are telling anyone who will listen that a great deal of opposition to the Iraq War is coming from people who want to win it, not from those who want immediate withdrawal. And not all of those are Republicans. The Democrats — including Alan Fram — are greatly overestimating the appeal of the "troops out now" mantra. They've been treating "war critics" as a homogenous group whose members want to cut and run. If the "great middle" were really on the Democrats' side of the issue, the independents would be running away from McCain, not towards him.
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Polls: Media Leading Democrats Over a Cliff 14 Comments (0 topical, 14 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
are deeply flawed.
first: It's bias [clearly demonstrated ad nauseum] that leads the media to think that way. They don't lack for diligence: look how enthusiastically they document every Bush verbal flub, long after his lack of public speaking skills has ceased to be news.
Second: Who the heck approves of war? It's something that at best is necessary, never good.
I do not believe in polls, they are like something fun to do in high school. I believe in results, something in print can be seen and felt...I want to see people put their money where their mouth is...I do not believe polls because anyone can say anything.
the questions could be biased, the answers could be also. Who are they asking, when are they asking the questions?
getting out and talking to the people, seeing what problems they really have is how to determine what the people need.
Anyone can say that they feel the country is in recession on a poll just because they can't afford a new 45inch flat screen or some such nonsense.
I don't believe in polls.
It's always been true that if you have control over the presentation of the analysis of the data that you can make it serve whatever presumption you wish, within reasonable bounds.
These results are telling anyone who will listen that a great deal of opposition to the Iraq War is coming from people who want to win it, not from those who want immediate withdrawal. And not all of those are Republicans. The Democrats — including Alan Fram — are greatly overestimating the appeal of the "troops out now" mantra.
I suspect that's always been true, but good luck if you're trying to get that interpretation of the data presented alongside the others. At a gut level, I know that it's correct that most Republicans and most Independents would (if they have their thinking caps screwed on straight) have always wanted the United States to prevail in the conflict. They've gotten the occasional bouts of dyspepsia, but most of them want the U.S. to help Iraq succeed in creating an independent state that is an ally of the United States. They know what the stakes are.
There has never been a more wretched hive of scum and villany than the people who have been presenting "statistics" based on interpretations of polling data than has occurred in this conflict, precisly because here in the United States it has been a limited conflict and therefore something that opinion shapers can toy around with, almost at their whim.
Great post.
And I mean image processing in the fourier-transform and filtering sense, not image as in "my publicist told me to say this..."
50 people starting with the same image on separate computers with good image processing software and told to look for interesting features will come up with 50 different end results. Out of those 50, most of them will be trivial and irrelevant. If it's in your vested interest to present a certain kind of picture and you're the judge of which one is the "best" you can pick the one you like, and the media has done that deliberately.
Computers generate the calls and most of the calls go to people in urban areas. Since urban areas are almost exclusively populated by a majority of Democrats in blue states, any nation-wide poll taken will be biased in favor of the liberal agenda. Just one more reason why they can't be trusted - in addition to the fact that folks simply lie to pollsters.
Who decided that the states that vote for the Republican candidate are "red" states? The color red is historically associated with socialism, Marxism & communism. So shouldn't the states voting for Dems be red and the R states blue? Who made this decision?
Feel free to discuss that in an open thread. This treadjack ends here, though.
Thank you for your cooperation.
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
in the war, largely due to the failure of our craptacular media to give the public even the minimal information they needed to judge the progress of the surge as measured against expectations.
Most people had no idea what it was, other than an escalation in troops, which, they had been told, was bad. You had to dig really deep to find out the truly innovative and brilliant changes in strategy and tactics that the surge involved.
Except for military bloggers and some conservative publications and sites, I don't recall any discussion in the popular media of the surge, other than to predict its failure.
We now find ourselves in the strange situation of having a general agreement that the surge has succeeded, yet a majority of Americans are 'antiwar" in some sense, and want to pull all our troops out.
Is this because they are genuinely antiwar, in the Democrat sense, they want us to lose? Surely not.
rather, it was because the media set up a very false dichotomy: Do you want to send more troops to Iraq to get killed in a pointless war, or do you want to pull all our troops out and bring peace to Iraq. For all of last year, as the surge was revealed as a stunning success, Americans asked for door number 2.
It doesn't surprise me that voters who describe themselves as antiwar are voting for McCain. They may not know who Petraeus is or what the Anbar Awakening is, but they know that they want to do something different, they want to win, they want to believe in what we are doing.
McCain is educating people on the war, this may be one of his greatest contributions this year. We discuss these details and developments here, but in general most Americans are still unaware of the history of the last few years. As they find out more about the surge, the polls will reflect that.
Great post, very thought-provoking!
In the polls regarding Iraq that I've seen, I've not seen the question posed something like "do you feel that not enough is being done to win in as short a time possible?" Those doing the polling have no doubt had preconceived notions & outcomes desired, & have polled to get those outcomes. Most people I know want it "won & done."
First, I think that this has less to do with bias and more to do with the media being lazy and thinking of things in simple terms. In this case, a person is either for or against the war, maybe on the fence, but a person does not have any more nuanced views than that. This would be why all people disapproving of the war get lumped together.
Second, we are now following the strategy McCain supported. This result is odd in the sense that you would expect a McCain supporter to say the following: "I supported the war at first, thought it was waged poorly, was glad to see a new strategy and think that it is now going well." And you would expect that such a person would say they approve of the war.