The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: mystery-ak on October 11, 2013, 10:57:07 pm
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http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/ted-cruz-unskews-the-polls-20131009 (http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/ted-cruz-unskews-the-polls-20131009)
By Alex Seitz-WaldFollow October 9, 2013
Don't worry, Ted Cruz is telling his fellow Republicans, about that new Gallup Poll showing that the GOP's favorability rating has sunk to an all-time low. And ignore the National Journal, Washington Post, CBS News, AP, CNN, and Pew surveys showing that Americans are mostly blaming Republicans for the government shutdown.
Those are all wrong, the Texas senator is telling his GOP colleagues, because he has his own poll, and it shows the GOP is winning.
As David Drucker reports at The Washington Examiner, Cruz argued to Republicans at a closed-door lunch on Wednesday that the campaign he led to shutdown the government over Obamacare has bolstered the GOP's political position, rather than hurt it. Cruz says he knows this because he paid for his own poll, conducted by his own partisan pollster, who was on hand to explain the results to his skeptical colleagues.
Despite all that, the poll was not much rosier than all public polls, showing that the public blames Republicans for the shutdown by a 7 point margin.
To Cruz, as Drucker writes, this shows that "Republicans are in a much better position than they were during the 1995 shutdown because this impasse is defined by a disagreement over funding for the Affordable Care Act as opposed to a general disagreement over government spending."
Maybe Cruz is right, and maybe Republicans are "winning," and maybe his pollster is better than everyone else's. Maybe.
But if not, then he's falling victim to same fallacy Republicans ran into leading up the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was reportedly so convinced that he was going to win that he didn't even bother writing a concession speech. The national public opinion data was pretty clearly showing the opposite, but some on the right stuck to the echo chamber, where the polls were unskewed and the vibes were good, leading to Dick Morris predicting as late as 8 p.m. on election night that Romney would still win big, and later to an on-screen meltdown from Karl Rove when Romney lost Ohio.
The fancy word for this is "epistemic closure," but basically it means only believing what you want to believe and ignoring the rest. That may be why Cruz thought that Barack Obama would ever agree to defund his signature legislative accomplishment. Or thinking, as a large number of Republican lawmakers seem to, that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be no big deal.
But unlike the election, if Cruz is wrong and breaching the debt ceiling is as catastrophic as most economists are predicting, this time the whole country loses.
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Commentary: Ted Cruz unskews the polls (http://www.examiner.com/article/commentary-ted-cruz-unskews-the-polls)
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The only thing Ted Cruz has done is convince the GOP that he's a bombthrower. They will never follow him on anything, ever again.
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43% of Respondents are Democrats and 32% were Republicans. 44% voted for Obama vs 35% for Romney. And 5% did not know who the voted for?
(Pg. 16, towards the middle/bottom of page)
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNBCpoll10072013.pdf (http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/WSJNBCpoll10072013.pdf)
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The sample was of ADULTS! Not registered voters or likely voters but ADULTS!
Totally and completely WORTHLESS!
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The MSM polls are skewed because they assume everyone thinks the shutdown is bad. If you ask "who is to blame for the shutdown" and the respondent wants to give Republicans credit for having the cajones to do it, then he would tend to answer "Republicans." It's a completely loaded question and utterly meaningless as a gauge of public opinion.
I'd like to see polls about whether Americans think they are personally affected by the shutdown, whether they think it might be necessary to shut down the government in order to get needed reforms, etc. Unfortunately, the GOP seems to buy into the MSM meme on this, even though it plays into the establishment framing of the issue.
Also, I'm sick of Fox News and Krauthammer. It seems no one there supports what is right at this point.
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Ive almost completely stopped watching Fox. I will add I sm also dick of yellow spined people who claim to be Republicans and do nothing but trash conservatives and embrace big governments ruin of this nation.
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Ive almost completely stopped watching Fox. I will add I sm also dick of yellow spined people who claim to be Republicans and do nothing but trash conservatives and embrace big governments ruin of this nation.
:amen: to you and massadvj! About the only one left who stays the course is Sean Hannity. Kelly and O'Reilly go out of the way to show how unbiased they are. Greta used to be a democrat, but she also a huge supporter of Sarah Palin, so I imagine she is leaning conservative/libertarian now.
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:amen: to you and massadvj! About the only one left who stays the course is Sean Hannity. Kelly and O'Reilly go out of the way to show how unbiased they are. Greta used to be a democrat, but she also a huge supporter of Sarah Palin, so I imagine she is leaning conservative/libertarian now.
Well, yall just go right ahead and watch MSNBC or CNN. This place is turning into TOS.
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The MSM polls are skewed because they assume everyone thinks the shutdown is bad. If you ask "who is to blame for the shutdown" and the respondent wants to give Republicans credit for having the cajones to do it, then he would tend to answer "Republicans." It's a completely loaded question and utterly meaningless as a gauge of public opinion.
:amen: :amen: and :amen:
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Well, yall just go right ahead and watch MSNBC or CNN. This place is turning into TOS.
Has it ever, even once, occurred to you that there are some people around here smart enough to form opinions on their own? That do not need talking heads on TV to do it for them?
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Has it ever, even once, occurred to you that there are some people around here smart enough to form opinions on their own? That do not need talking heads on TV to do it for them?
Yep. I do it all the time.
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Yep. I do it all the time.
Yet you assume because we turn off Fox we tuned in to MSNBC or CNN...