Pollsters Ask Loaded Questions, but Public Still Backs Bush
Wes Vernon Thursday, Feb. 1, 2001 Pollsters for the mainstream media have stacked the deck against President Bush in seeking "public opinion,” according to a pollster who often tracks voting trends for the GOP.
Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, CEO and president of the firm "the polling company," accuses the segments of the mainstream media of engaging in "egregious questions” weighted on the negative side.
Fitzpatrick stops short of using the term "push polling,” choosing instead to refer to "examples of how the media typifies their political bias against President Bush.” The questions cited by the pollster "appear to be written with a specific intent to portray President Bush in an unfavorable light as well as cast doubt on his presidency in its infancy.”
In the instances she cites, the negative text of the question does not match the positive.
Example: CBS News, Jan. 15-17. "Given that a majority of voters did NOT vote for George W. Bush, do you think it will be harder for him to accomplish his goals as president, or won’t it make any difference?”
Interestingly, those questioned seemed to ignore the tone of the question. Fifty-five percent answered it wouldn't make any difference. Only 41 percent answered it would be harder.
Example: ABC News/Washington Post, Jan. 11-15. "Bush has nominated Gale Norton for secretary of the interior. Some environmental groups oppose this nomination. Do you think the U.S. Senate should or should not confirm Norton as Secretary of the Interior?"
Again, the pesky voters, or at least a plurality, refused to be steered. Forty-six percent said Should Confirm. Twenty-eight percent said Should Not Confirm. Twenty-five percent had no opinion.
Example: Newsweek, Jan. 10-12. "Do you think Bush should scale back his political Agenda because he lost the popular vote nationwide and had such a narrow margin in the Electoral College, OR that he should go ahead and pursue his plans for the country regardless of these factors?"
And here the respondents seemed to blow the questioners out of the water. Sixty-eight percent said Should Pursue Plans. Only 26 percent said Should Scale Back. Six percent said Don’t Know.
Of the examples cited by Fitzpatrick, only the loaded question on John Ashcroft elicited a negative response, and even that was by a narrow margin.
Newsweek, Jan 10-12. "Do you think Congress should approve Bush’s choice of John Ashcroft as Attorney General, or reject Ashcroft as too far right on issues like abortion, drugs, and gun control to be an effective Attorney General? The results were: Should Approve, 37 percent; Should Not Approve, 41 percent; Don’t Know, 22 percent.
Similar loaded questions nonetheless found (Washington Post/ABC News) that 58 percent believed Bush had been legitimately elected as president (This was asked more than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court decision that cemented his victory), and (Newsweek) that 50 percent believed he had not sacrificed for ideology or diversity in picking his Cabinet members.
The Union Vote
Fitzpatrick came up with some interesting polling numbers of her own on voting trends in labor union households.
In 1996, Bob Dole garnered only 31 percent of the union vote, as opposed to Bill Clinton’s 62 percent. But in 2000, George W. Bush got a respectable 43 percent, compared to Al Gore’s 53 percent.
Thus when AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says that only 3 out of 10 union members will go against the union leadership’s left-wing recommendations, in reality Bush captured better than 4 out of 10.
Aside from loaded questions, Fitzpatrick cites other violations of good polling techniques in the major media. For example, asking voters to render an opinion on a subject they are not qualified to answer. Examples include: an opinion on Gale Norton’s confirmation when most Americans had never heard of her, or, "When do you think the Middle East conflict will end?”, or "How serious is McCain’s cancer?”
-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), February 01, 2001