The Boston Globe and the AP report that 37% of Americans support OWS:
More than one-third of the country supports the Wall Street protests, and even more — 58 percent — say they are furious about America’s politics.The number of angry people is growing as deep reservoirs of resentment grip the country, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll.Some 37 percent of people back the protests that have spread from New York to cities across the country and abroad, one of the first snapshots of how the public views the “Occupy Wall Street’’ movement. A majority of those protest supporters are Democrats, but the anger about politics in general is much more widespread, the poll indicates.
Nowhere in the article does it say how many oppose it. Doing so requires tracking down the actual polling report, which I found here. Oddly enough, the poll itself does not even ask directly how many oppose it, although 56% say they are “Not Supporters” of OWS (7% are undecided).
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Americans oppose it 56%-37%, since some neutral individuals might also consider themselves not to support OWS, but these numbers are still fairly negative and should have been reported as such.
But I also wondered why they would use such a strange and sloppy question wording, and looking through the polling report, I found an answer. They include, for comparison, their polling on the Tea Party, which shows somewhat worse numbers than OWS, and notice that they have been using the same wording to ask about the Tea Party since the beginning. Ironically, the AP used a polling question that is biased against OWS because they reused the wording form their polling on the Tea Party, probably so that they could compare results.
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