The Ontario Republican, a new blog in the district, has been addressing some of the S-CHIP polling reports. The Republican thinks that the USA Today poll originally cited by Randy Kuhl is
pretty good, and he thinks another, less favorable poll by the Kaiser foundation is
skewed toward Democrats.
I'll go into a little more detail on S-CHIP polling in a moment, but I want to emphasize a general point that I made in the
post on the Kaiser poll. My overall opinion on issue polls like these is that they are so biased by the way that questions are constructed that they are pretty useless for determining "real" public opinion. For example, the USA Today/Gallup poll on S-CHIP
was criticized for its question construction, but I think that criticism is probably applicable to a lot of issue polls. The reason is that a random sample of the electorate is only educated enough to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" view of any issue. When pollsters try to probe the reasons behind the thumb up or down, they have to inject some facts into their questions, and their choice of facts adds some bias to their questions.
The way to control for this bias is to look at moving averages from multiple polls for many time periods. Unfortunately, only the biggest questions of our time have enough polling data to support this technique. The site
pollster.com has moving averages if you're interested.
Returning to S-CHIP, the Republican points out, rightly, that S-CHIP polling is hard to apply to the 29th district, which has a more Republican demographic than the country in general. But, since he and Kuhl started this discussion, let's look at few more nationwide polls.
The most recent one I could find was a
CBS News poll released last week. By an 81-15 margin, it found that respondents favored expanding S-CHIP. 74% of those who favored expansion would be willing to pay higher taxes to support S-CHIP expansion. A
CNN poll taken during the same timeframe, but asking a slightly different question, found that 61% favored veto override, while 35% do not. A late September
Washington Post poll found that 72% of those polled supported S-CHIP expansion, while 25% opposed it.
If the game we're playing is "what do the polls say", I think it's fair to conclude that the general, nationwide opinion on S-CHIP is thumbs up for expansion. I don't think that game is very interesting or informative, but I think the game that Kuhl was trying to play, which was "let's cherry-pick the one poll that agrees with my position", is worse.
Hopefully this post puts the S-CHIP polling issue to bed. It shouldn't have come up in the first place. Unfortunately, President Bush and the House Republican leadership have put Kuhl in a position where he's casting about for ever-more flimsy defenses of his S-CHIP vote. I think Kuhl and other House Republicans would have been better off if they followed the example of some of their Senate colleagues.
Chuck Grassley is no flaming liberal, yet he understands that S-CHIP expansion needs to be passed, and he's willing to vote for an override.
Comments
The reason is that a random sample of the electorate is only educated enough to give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" view of any issue. When pollsters try to probe the reasons behind the thumb up or down, they have to inject some facts into their questions, and their choice of facts adds some bias to their questions.
Well said. Until we have essay rather than multiple choice polling questions we just have to assume a much larger margin of error than is advertised.
Someone should make some hay on the fact that the Republicans are suddenly so obsessed with polls ;).
Right, I thought being too concerned with polls was a bad thing.
Interestingly, the Ontario Republican just posted a rebuttal to this post, in which he drills into the CNN, WP and CBS polls to show why the questions were phrased incorrectly. Needless to say, I agree that the questions probably could have been phrased better, but overall 3 out of 4 national, reputable polls show that the population is generally supportive of S-CHIP. More importantly, when you're quibbling with polls, it shows that, at a minimum, you need to do more work to "educate" the electorate. That's hard to do.
The Dems have a clear advantage on this issue. That's why they're hitting it so hard.