Are conservatives losing the polling war?
Mar 14, 2009 Governmental Reach
I was caught off guard this morning by a phone poll from an public education organization. I always hate to turn them down because there are politicians, like Obama, who value popularity greatly and develop policy around polls. I know it isn’t right, but it’s the way it is. My main goal with these polls is to say that:
- Public education is overfunded
- Public education is not providing the skills needed to succeed in this world
- We need a voucher system that allows for some incentive for schools to do better and attract students (or get out of the business)
- I’m disappointed that alternative lifestyles, for which there is significant evidence that they are hurting people and society overall, are presented in a way that is equal to those lifestyles that have been the foundation for good, working societies
At one point I was asked the following question:
Do you believe that public education is adequately funded, somewhat adequately funded, somewhat inadequately funded, or inadequately funded?
I proceeded to tell the person polling me (fortunately it wasn’t a machine) that I thought that public education was terribly overfunded and I wasn’t sure which of the four categories that fit in. I suppose I should have said it was adequately funded, though I didn’t want to give the idea that I was happy about the amount of tax dollars taken from me to achieve far less than private education was doing (on far fewer dollars). I think it was ultimately decided that my answer should be inadequately funded. Surely this will look, in the final numbers, like I was one of the people willing to give more money to “improve education for our children.” Of course, there were other answers that got to the crux of this, but public education advocates will surely use the better of the two numbers.
This led me to wonder: Are public polls skewed to give the impression that conservatives and libertarians sometimes agree with ultra-liberal views? Are the questions designed such that no answer would fit the conservative/libertarian mindset very well, and so we are left to choose one of the others, all of which can be spun to oppose our actual viewpoint on the issue?
I would appreciate your comments on this.
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March 16th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Anything less than a structured interview is meaningless. Not only can the questions skew the poll but the questionee’s interpretation of the question is all over the place. My Specialist Degree was in Psychometrics but I’m never asked to be on any stat gathering committee because I’ve told them that the survey statistics administrators live by are meaningless. Hmm!
When answering poll type questions always go for the extreme answer you believe in to counteract the built in skew of the bell curve.
Whenever I talk about public education (government schools) in Wisconsin I add “of sainted memory” to Tommy Thompson’s name. WEAC (Wisconsin ‘s Education Teachers Union) and the Democratic party are one and the same in Wisconsin. They are one of the major contributors to the Democrats. You people in Minnesota don’t overtly have that but a surprising number of you legislators are education types.