Seriously, who's surprised that New York's most famous catbox liner discovered that Americans overwhelmingly support the unions?
From NYTimes via Hotair -- Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.
The questions were totally loaded to get the respondent to answer a certain way. Here's an example:
*In order to reduce state budget deficits, do you favor or oppose cutting pay and benefits for public employees?
Notice they didn't ask about unionized public employees, just public employees. Also, they didn't give the respondent an opportunity to separate pay from benefits, nor did they accurately portray the labor situation in Wisconsin where they aren't cutting pay or benefits, just asking employees to contribute more to their own retirement and health-care commensurate with the rest of working Americans.
As always Rush Limabugh hit it out of the park when he suggested this poll question on his show today:
(paraphrased) Would you support paying higher taxes to fund the salaries and benefits packages of unionized public employees, who already make on average twice what you do, who don't have to contribute much of anything to their own retirement, pay nothing for health-care, and have lifetime job security?
I'll bet if the NYTimes asked that question of the same sampling of people, the results would be the opposite of what they reported. Don't ever believe polling results until you've read the questions.
5 comments:
Constant polling is a scourge on our representative democracy - even if it's honest. When it's used strategically and designed for pre-determined results, it's far worse.
Right you are. Because people wrongly assume the questions are straight forward, even-handed, and fair. They rarely are, and political pollsters who want have a predetermined outcome know they can manipulate respondents by subtley skewing the questions to ellicit a known response.
There is also the little matter of whom is being polled and how they "adjust" the mix. There are so many tricks in unethical, outcome based polling.
Polling (and statisitics) - the science of say anything (you want).
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