The media has worked just as hard as Democrats to demonize DeSantis and this bill, but the public isn’t buying it.Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:
Sorry, ABC: Politico/Morning Consult poll shows majority support for Florida sex-ed limitsAnd it’s not even close, despite Politico’s carefully crafted lead:
American voters are sharply divided over two contentious bills Florida’s state Legislature recently passed that deal with the teaching of race and gender identity, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll of registered voters.
“Sharply divided,” in this case, means majority support for the supposed “Don’t Say Gay” bill that Ron DeSantis has endorsed. That’s no narrow window either, but instead a 51/35 support level for restricting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity below the fourth-grade level. An even slightly higher percentage, 52/37, support limiting such discussions at and above that level to “age-appropriate discussions.”
That isn’t just a GOP phenomenon either:
In both instances, support was considerably higher among Republican registered voters, but there was also backing from independent voters. Seventy percent of GOP voters, for example, supported banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in lower grades compared to 51 percent of Democrats who opposed the legislation. The poll found that 46 percent of independent voters supported the ban compared to 35 percent who opposed it.
So what happened in that ABC-Ipsos poll this week? That one supposedly showed Americans in widespread opposition to the Florida legislation, but it smelled bad from the start. ABC and Ipsos acknowledged that they had oversampled LGBTQ respondents in a 622-person sample, a very strange outcome for a supposedly scientific poll of randomly surveyed Americans (not registered voters). As I suggested on Monday, this looks like a cooked sample that intended to deliver an editorial narrative rather than tell the truth:
Are we to believe that it’s a coincidence that ABC/Ipsos just so happened to oversample this community on a polling question that directly relates to them?Especially given the smaller sample size for a national poll (622 adults, not registered voters), it would appear that the pollster focused on specific localities where one would normally find a greater-than-usual percentage of LGBTQ respondents. If the calls were made mostly in urban areas, and perhaps especially in urban areas known for a more robust LGBTQ culture, then it would not only explain the oversample but also the results from non-LGBTQ-identifying adult respondents.
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