Tea-Bag 2: Electric Bugaloo

There are still a lot of Republicans in America, a lot of people voted for McCain, but a lot more voted for Obama-Biden and the total electorate sent a large Democratic majority in November after a two year election cycle with the intent that they do what they said they would do. The GOP faithful, White Males aged 45-70, are going to concerts, grooving to speakers, and using passive resistance to bring down the "man". Like wow.

The intensity of the outliers also known as the extremists from the Right Wing is increasingly more angry, as their rage is fomented by their addictions to cable news and talk radio. If I believed that the President was from another Country and planned on turning the US into the Fourth Reich I'd be pissed off as well. But, none of that is true, but as far as politics go, a quarter to a third of us live in one reality where the above is perceived to be true, about half live in the real world of complexity and reason, the rest if not more are totally unaware. That's cable television and dead newspapers, common experiences are less common, but more intense for those paying attention to what they perceive to be real.

I don't have a problem with The President calling "bullshit" when it comes obstruction of his democratically elected agenda by virtue of his election, (when a black man with the middle name Hussein wins Virginia and North Carolina when a white decorated combat veteran from the same party can't, IT'S A MANDATE). I know the general public doesn't trust the GOP for spit when it comes to comparing facts after the last eight years, so Obama needs to keep it simple and keep communicating, we only had an election seven months ago, in a democratic republic, that's how we settle leadership disputes. This makes the GOP look frivolous, deranged, and non-appetizing to the voters they desperately need to attract to form a majority, single women, and Independents. The GOP sharps are going, "Oh No!" to themselves. So if Conservatives want to go wild and act the fool let them, but don't join in on it, and if you're a member of Congress who can't control a crowd with your leadership, maybe you have the wrong job. Let the local Police handle this, Conservatives love the Police. The Police have no problem arresting liberal protesters and it could be their badge of courage. The First Amendment doesn't protect incitement of violence including Obama in hung in effigy of and it doesn't protect obstruction of process, otherwise the Republicans in Congress would just shout down proceedings all day every day.

That they've convinced 25-30% of Americans that the liberals are really fascists is a very scary trick. That idea is designed disinformation for the first generations, registering to vote, who don't remember WWII, and have been directly lied to. Total Alice in Wonderland stuff. Up is down, down is up. Propagandists claim that the bigger the lie the more effective. The problem is America has a lot of work to get done, and if we get caught up in this talking about how we talk non-sense is more time goes on the clock for those without access to health insurance, the longer it takes to ease climate change and re-invent our economy to be free of foreign sources of energy, the worse off we are in general. So let the Conservative have their say, up to the point where they prevent the intentions of a plurality of Americans as reflected in our democratic election in November, let the local Police handle it during the town halls, don't get hooked by these hookers.

Book Review from The Monkey Cage, Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys

In one of my posts on the value of polls, I quoted from Howard Schuman’s 2008 book,Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys (Amazon). Having now finished the book, I highly recommend it.

The book feels a bit like a memoir. Drawing on his corpus of research, Schuman reflects on a how polls are conducted (the “method”) and how they can be interpreted (the “meaning”).

He explores the limits of thinking of polls as referenda. This chapter produces the quote from my earlier post:

The tendency to take too literally single-variable distributions of responses (the “marginals”) is essentially the same as believing that answers come entirely from respondents, forgetting that they are also shaped by the questions we ask.

Schuman discusses a variety of ways to work around this problem: including open-ended question, proliferating closed-ended questions so as to capture complexities in opinion, designing survey exepimernets that test, e.g., the effects of different question wordings, and enlisting the participation of opposing sides on a contentious political debate. He describes a survey on the use of animals in medical experiments in which he consulted both with medical professionals and animal rights activists.

Schuman also discusses the benefits and costs of both open-ended and closed questions. Here a point from the first chapter becomes crucial. He writes:

No it is not usually tiny changes in wording that make marginals so untrustworthy, but several other factors about questions….First, respondents feel enormously constrained to stay within the framework of the survey question. They will almost always use one of the two or three or more alternatives given by the interviewer, rather than offering a substitute of their own, even if a substitute is allowed or encouraged and would have great effect. Similarly, consistent effects on marginals occur with variations in formal aspects of questions (e.g., whether a “don’t know” response is encouraged or discouraged).

In my experience, concern about the reliability of polls almost always fixates on tiny changes in wording. (Indeed, when I teach about the effects of question wording, I focus on these sorts of examples—e.g., “aid to the poor” vs. “welfare,” “allow vs. “not forbid”). But Schuman gets at a more profound aspect of question wording. He shows clearly that what respondents volunteer in response to an open-ended question will differ dramatically from what they will choose in a closed question. In a 1986 survey, only 1% of respondents volunteered that “the invention of the computer” was the “most important” event or change over the past 50 years, but 30% chose that option when it was given as part of a closed list of options.

A more recent example concerns two polls assessing blame for the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. See this post by Gary Langer of ABC. When people were given an option for “both Gates and Crowley are to blame,” 29% chose it. When not provided this option, only 10% chose it. The further consequence is that people are more likely to blame Crowley (25%) when “both” is not offered than if it is offered (11%).

Schuman also discusses the value of “why” questions, or questions designed to probe the logic and reasoning behind opinions. Take this simple question: “do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” In two 1971 surveys, Schuman followed this question with another: “Why do you think it was a mistake?” The question provoked a range of responses having to do with the winnability of the war, the number of casualties, the “civil” nature of the conflict, and other themes. Most interesting was the difference between the two surveys, one of the general public and the other of college students. The students were far more likely to express concerns about the number of Vietnamese killed and the morals ofU.S. policy. There were also differences within the general public based on sex and race. Such differences signal the value of these questions:

Random probes are especially useful when respondents differ from investigators in educational and cultural terms.

Other topics in the book include:

• Survey artifacts, including some surprising findings with regard to the“Communist reporters” question, as well as Schuman’s famous “three pens experiment” — in which Nicaraguan respondents were more likely to support a particular party when the pen they used to fill out the survey was painted the colors of that party.

• The role of attitude centrality and the connection between attitudes and behaviors. For example, in a 1978 poll, Schuman found that less than 5% of gun control proponents who said the issue was their “most important” issue actually wrote a letter, donated money, or took some other action. Among gun control opponents, the comparable fraction was about 55%.

Reading Schuman’s book should locate readers at an ideal point on the continuum between what he calls “survey fundamenatlism” and “survey cynicism.”

This is a must read article, if you don't read the book, Americans in general have no idea of how to correctly interpret polling, so guys like this take advatange of that fact.

This is American Politics.



In nature, only the most curious squirrel has enough nut meat for Winter.

An excerpt from David Axlrod's book on the Obama-McCain-Clinton race from The Washington Post,

Drawing on his legal background, he offered "a theory of the case" that he said guided his campaign. "For at least a decade, maybe longer," he said, Americans have been "frustrated with a government that was unresponsive; that their economic life was becoming more difficult despite the surface prosperity; that wages and incomes had flat-lined and that in this new globalized world people were feeling more and more insecure; that we had never replaced or updated the structures for security that the New Deal had provided with something that made sense for this new economy; that people were weary of culture wars as a substitute for policy; that people were tired of only focusing on what divides instead of what brought us together; that the 50-plus-one electoral strategies that were generally pursued in national elections were completely inadequate to solve big problems like health care and energy that would require a broader consensus; that people were embarrassed by the decline in America's standing in the eyes of the world and that that would have political relevance to voters who normally might not care that much about foreign policy; and that the American people were decent and good and would be open to a different tone to politics.

Further excerpts to come here.