[lbo-talk] race costing Obama about 6 points

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Sep 23 16:35:48 PDT 2008


At 08:48 PM 9/22/2008, Doug Henwood wrote:


>On Sep 22, 2008, at 8:28 PM, shag wrote:
>
>>earlier today, at lunch, i was reviewing the write ups around this
>>poll.
>
>AP's chief political correspondent, Ron Fournier, is purported to be
>some sort of Republican. So, by doing this poll, AP gets to inject
>race into the campaign - i.e, remind white people, in case they hadn't
>noticed, that Obama's black. Not to be cynical or anything.
>
>Doug

grrr. i wondered about that. the whole thing seemed fishy to me. not that i don't think race has nothing to do with what's going on, but the fact that this was cut lose now....? there's been all kinds of time to discuss this. all of a sudden, there's a poll? and it gets so much air-time?

be that as it may, as i dug into the poll, I thought the party id and political ideology questions yielded odd results. plus, looking at the religion questions... frig. a bunch of people are certain obama's not christian. and some dogawful percentage think it's personally a-ok to use religion to judge a candidate. blergh.

anyway, someone more familiar with recent party id and political ideology polling outcomes might have clue. i haven't looked at this stuff in years and I'm not feeling up to going to the NORC data set to find out if it's still open to the public and dicking around if it is. maybe people on AAPOR would have some ideas, if the question isn't too simple for that venue.

According to the poll:

Party ID:Do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican, an Independent, a supporter of some other party, or none of these?

Democrat 49 Republican 36 Independent 7 Some other party 1 None of these 7 Refused / Not Answered 0

Nearly half are democrats. But then you have this re ideology, so some of the democrats consider themselves conservative:

ID1. Generally speaking, do you consider yourself

Very liberal 6 Somewhat liberal 17 Moderate 43 Somewhat conservative 22 Very conservative 11 Refused / Not Answered 1

Then, it turns out that, weeding out a preference for moderate, more respondents would prefer a conservative than a lib:

CIS12. Would you prefer that the next president be politically conservative, liberal, or moderate? Wave 6 Conservative 30 Liberal 21 Moderate 47 Refused / Not Answered 2



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