More Misleading Poll Crap
Posted by bulldogpundit
Ankle Biting Pundits
Friday, 27 January 2006
Topic: President Bush
Man, today must be our lucky day. Earlier we dismembered the latest NYT/CBS news poll, and now, just in time for the weekend comes an equally crappy LA Times poll headlined "Bush's Ratings Sink, but Trust Remains".
Once again the poll has included misleading and incorrect questions, especially in the area of polling about the NSA Surveillance Program. Will they never learn?
First, while the poll does break the responses down by party, they never give you demographics. Someone with better math skills than I can figure out the party ID of the respondents but I'm no math major. Perhaps someone could help me out by looking at the numbers (linked below).
Even worse, the poll gives no demographics as to age, income, religion, region, whether on not the respondent voted in the last election etc. To their credit, both the NYT and Wash. Post polls will give you that data.
Here is the full list of questions and responses.
latimes.com
But just because we don't know the demographics doesn't mean we can't point out just how misleading and inaccurate the questions are.
Take for example Question #34 which reads:
Quote: As you may know, George W. Bush authorized federal government agencies to use electronic surveillance to monitor phone calls and emails within the United States without first getting a court warrant to do so. Do you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?
By a margin of 49-45% poll respondents approved of such warantless searches. What's amazing is that the approval numbers came out that way even though the question mentioned that warantless searches of phones and emails took place "within the United States".
The question is both misleading and incomplete. The program being used by the Bush Administration has at least one caller who is overseas and is a suspected terrorist. Can anyone in their right mind not say the gap would have been even wider had they included those very relevant facts?
Next look at the foolish wording of Question #35:
Quote: Would you mind if you found out that your phone calls were being monitored by the U.S. government as part of the fight against terrorism?
By a margin of 53-46% people would mind. However, the question implies that the government is just randomly checking phone calls, when that is not the case. Of course someone with something to hide would mind. The question should have given the caveat "if they suspected you were speaking with someone overseas suspected of terrorism".
So what does this poll tell us on the issue of the NSA program? That even with the misleading and inaccurate questions, Americans still support the Bush Administrations use of this tool in fighting terror.
For the Democrats to make political hay out of this would be a huge mistake - especially since the public doesn't trust them with our national defense to begin with.
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