Republican poll chasers and the madness of crowds
Do what’s right, and worry about the polls closer to November 2014
Another conversation I had with myself on Twitter.
Last time it was about The Republican Brand. This time it’s about the lunacy of Republicans — stoked by the media — panicking over polling last week showing Republicans dropping like a stone into a mountain crevice.
Today Pew released its polling, and it found essentially no change in Republican favorability over the past year. Democrats poll better in terms of favorability, but that’s been the case for a long time.
Republicans actually are in a slightly better position today than a year out from the 2010 Republican landslide, and are rated better in terms of handling the economy and running government.
I don’t say Pew knows any better than the other pollsters, or vice versa, but that’s the point. Do what’s right, and worry about the 2014 polls closer to November 2014. For God’s sake, Republicans, stop acting like bouncing Super Balls based on the latest polling.
First some Pew charts:
Now my conversation with myself on Twitter:
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR But, but end of Republican Party!!!
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR but, but deep lasting damage to brand!!!
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR Obviou$ly Pew building mailing list!
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR #sadtrombone from @davidfrum
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR U mean all that soul searching over nothing?
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR don't know how much more of this I can take
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR Unskew! Unskew!
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
Pew: "Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year" http://t.co/UXABiSQudR a poll fell in forest but no one heard it fall
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2013
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Comments
>>”Do what’s right, and worry about the polls closer to November 2014″
Huh? “Do what’s right”? What does that mean? Sounds weird to me. Sounds like a dead old white man proverb. What’s the angle? And how do I know if it’s “right”? Who tells me? What if the media thinks it’s wrong? This is too hard, my head hurts. Just get me the poll. And make sure it was produced by a polling firm with establishment connections and with a 10-15% skew toward democrat. They know what’s best for me. That’s all I understand, or want to understand. No risk, no fear. Nothing changed, nothing lost.
I was just about to dispatch a Deprogramming Team for you until I picked up on the sarcasm.
This is a poll of how many people?
And the demographics? Have Democrats (or government employees) been oversampled again?
The computer science term used to describe polls is:
GIGO
If the GOP bases their decisions on what is popular rather than what they think is right, what would be the difference between them and the Democrats?
Who says Democrats do what’s popular? A variety of polls, formal and informal, have shown majorities saying they favor policies that align with a Republican agenda (though not identified as such), but then substantial numbers of those same people say they favor Democrats or just voted Democrat.
When Democrats win elections or polls, it might have less to do with their actions and policies than with the Kultursmog and the pervasive meme that Democrats are for the little people while Republicans are for the plutocrats. A lot of people believe that, without knowing why they do.
The polling is a pretext. There are financial lobby and contributor reasons that certain establishment Republicans are constantly doing the wrong thing. Those same factors also are anti-Tea Party.
Personally, I am waiting for this headline …
“Poll shows Obama is a bitter clinger desperately holding onto his healthcare regs and executive power.”
Over the last eight years, the Republican party has earned every bit of the utter contempt I feel for them.
CPAC going pro-Islam was one of the last straws. The last straw was when my Senator Rubio joined with the Gang of Eight to sponsor the Amnesty bill.
After that, I wrote the Election Board and changed my voter registration to Independent.
When the RNC called a couple of weeks ago, I delivered a monologue and told the gentleman the Republicans would have to repent to earn my vote and money.
[…] Republican poll chasers and the madness of crowds Do what’s right, and worry about the polls closer to November 2014 […]
Listening to Mark Levin as I type this, I am reminded of Alinsky’s axiom that ‘The issue is never the issue’.
Levin’s point is that BO is attempting to take the power of the purse from the House by defaulting on the debt.
Obamacare is not the issue, the debt ceiling is not the issue, the debt is not the issue. The issue is–as it always is for the statist–power.
Obama is using this crisis to give cover to his power grab.
The House is chasing chickens.
Ronald Reagan, Lady Thatcher and The Pope defeated communism abroad, our task is to defeat it here. We start, by recognizing the evil in the White House.
Obama is using this crisis to give cover to his power grab.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Polls don’t reflect how people will vote. I think polls just show conservatives are more honest than Democrats. I have an unfavorable opinion of the GOP overall, but would I vote for a Democrat because of that? 15 years ago – maybe. Today — unequivocally no. That’s why I cannot call myself Independent. I will not vote for a Democrat ever again. Neither will I throw my vote away on a third party candidate. I am a Republican until something else comes along, and how I pray that happens in my lifetime.
People who keep saying we need a “third party” may not have looked at a ballot recently. There are already more than three parties; most of them don’t get many votes.
The notion that a new conservative party is going to get enough votes to stop the Dem-leftist juggernaut before it does a lot more damage is an airy fantasy.
The Democrat party includes a substantial number of far-leftists who were savvy enough to know that running in an openly far-left Marxist party wouldn’t get them far. Also, many leftists who think the Democrats on a given ballot are too “conservative” will still vote Democrat just to stop the Republicans. Why can’t conservatives figure this out?
Unless we stop the Democrats first, there’s no chance of restoring sanity in the land. Conservatives who allow leftists to win rather than sully their sense of purity by voting for a “Rino” are fools, and they hurt the rest of us.
With all the advertising pouring out of the MSM in favor of the Democrats, including the spiking of major stories by the Washington Post, the people’s assessment of the Republican party hasn’t changed.
In some places, an advertising campaign with that result would be a FAIL!
What galls is that polls are notoriously unreliable and easily steered the way the paying contractor wants. The poll that has apparently spooked the Don Knotts/Mr. Chicken GOP conducted by NBC/WJ was a simple poll of adults loaded +10 in favor of Democrats – the least accurate, least reliable methodology. The closest polls take large samples of likely voters with balance between party affiliations.
The polls for 2010 where all over the place. The polls for 2012 were all over the place. It is only AFTER elections that this or that poller brags ‘we nailed it!’ Stopped clock, twice a day, blind squirrels, etc.
Those polls later proved near accurate very likely accomplished by pure luck, by the statistical probability that if enough polls are conducted one of them is bound to come close. It’s like betting pools on the NCAA basketball tournaments – somebody has to win, but was it skill in predictions that causes the win or blind luck?
F**k polls.
[…] So why aren’t Republican “leaders” investing in their parties future by taking a hit now in order to win next year and in 2016? If Republican “leaders” don’t believe us perhaps they should read the Professor who agrees with our premise as he discusses the latest Pew poll: […]
Polls are just the latest propaganda tool. The old school politicos believe in them entirely, that’s why they’ve been co-opted.
Every morning on MSNBC there is a new and even “more legitimate” poll to prove everyone hates conservatives.
Every morning.
It’s only a matter of time before The Weather Channel attributes their forecast to how much Gaia hates conservatives.
Thank you, Prof Jacobson, for a cheery note of sanity. One more time. Maybe I’ll send some other conservatives a link to your post.
Well, seriously, I think Limbaugh’s view of the “Rockefeller wing” of the GOP remains a big bloc that has no problem with Leviathan government. They are very comfortable with overweening government, unfortunately. Fortunately, with the Internet, cellphones, spies in the inner circles of the GOP leadership, it’s harder for them to disguise their true positions. To keep “hiding the pea under the thimble” so we Tea Party types can’t see it. And threaten to Primary Them!
You can’t really say “pay no attention to all these polls – EXCEPT this one!”
At least, not and retain any credibility. Of course, credibility doesn’t seem a high priority for proponents of this insanity.
The ONLY salient point is that Obama and Reid have no incentive whatever to compromise as long as they are not being blamed more than Republicans in this fight, and there is NO poll showing any such thing.
The midterms are far enough off there is time for changes in attitudes and history shows events closer to them are most likely to more directly influence the outcome. But that doesn’t mean there is anything to gain for anyone here – except the demagogues Cruz and Lee who have assembled millions of names for their fundraising databases with their phony “petitions” against 404Care. And Obama, who benefits from the change of subject from his all-encompassing and pervasive incompetence.
He needed a gift. Cruz and his fans gave it to him.
Hey so what happens if a default happens?
I’m an engineer and I like to break shit that needs to be broken.
When you’re this far in debt, it’s damn hard ignore the “broke” part. I think the word is called denial or delusional.
Folks- it would be well advised to start thinking about what this looks like. If it can’t continue forever, it will stop… if not now, then at some point? It won’t be pretty.
“Republican” is a dirty word to the liberals, leftists — and now conservatives.
The GOP leadership are pariahs. Good riddance to them. Up with the Tea Party.
It’s been said repeatedly that many Republicans sat out the 2012 election because they weren’t excited to vote for Romney and didn’t see him as conservative enough. That may or may not be what happened in 2012; how would we know? Conservatives who believe it did happen then say it shows we need a more conservative candidate to win.
Maybe so. But it’s understandable if the GOP leadership looks at the election results and concludes the opposite: that the electorate preferred returning a far-left Democrat to the White House. Allowing Democrats to win when you could have done your part to stop them is not a good way to prod the GOP to be more conservative.
Well said, Radegunda
I voted for Mitt Romney because, after going through two other candidates, he ‘grew’ on me as the best candidate to counter Obama and the leftist agenda. His common sense solutions, considering how divided the electorate currently is, just made more sense as a way forward.
And, after his defeat, watching fellow conservatives blame him (and me by proxy) for not being able to achieve the impossible without quite a few of them’s help is frustrating. So frustrating that I have withdrawn from most political commentary after being active in campaigns for decades. The loud mouths have the floor and refuse to give it up. We have a President StompyFoot competing for the headlines with Congressional MyWayOrTheHighway newbies.
It’s important to remember that Boehner had and still has a high conservative rating among all but the most extreme rating agencies. He is also very politically savvy. All he needed to move the nation toward a more limited government was more support. We voted that support in and some of them immediately turned on him, and us, giving Obama and the left fodder and, more importantly, a wedge.
Obama’s goal is to break the GOP completely and his method is divide and conquer. He has been open about it.
Thanks again for expressing what is frustrating me greatly much better than I could.
Romney is a former Democrat Party member, instituted Romneycare in Massachusetts, and ‘fought’ Obama in the general with a tenth of the energy he spent against primary opponents. The GOP establishment again picked a nice guy loser right out of the gate, just like with Bob Dole in ’96, and McCain in ’08. Anyone who refused to vote for Romney has absolutely nothing to apologize for.
I understand the reason for the polls. The House is listening to their constituents, who are panicking about ObamaCare right now, and the Republicans there have to be given some cover from this so that they can vote the way that the DC power blocks want them too. It has always been a competition between the Washington establishment and the voters. The big problem right now for the former is that hundreds of billions of dollars every year are in jeopardy, since forcing the Senate to deal with budgets would force them back to a pre-Stimulus baseline. No wonder that that city is the one place that has flourished during the recession – everyone got their piece of the almost trillion dollars in additional spending – somewhere around 5% more of GDP now had to be filtered through all the grasping hands in DC.
The poll in question, the NBC/WJ poll, sampled only random adults, not likely voters, and structured a +10 skew in favor of Democrats. Random adults = LIVs. Likely voter sampling is far more accurate. That such a poll is not reliable is Politics 101 known to even the lowest political intern.
It is my contention that the establishment GOP seized on this worthless poll to justify what they wanted to do in the first place.
The Republicans have too many British General Percivals in their ranks, generals that will immediately surrender, to be slaughtered at will, 120,000 fresh, well rested, well fed, and well supplied soldiers to 30,000 nearly exhausted, nearly out of food and ammunition Japanese soldiers just because the Japanese surprised them with their sudden appearance from an unexpected direction