This week´s National Journal poll of leading political bloggers had three questions. In the first, Left bloggers were asked “on health care reform, what outcome would most benefit Democrats in the 2010 midterms?” Right bloggers were asked the same question about Republicans. Nobody picked the Baucus bill as likely to lead to the best political outcome for one party or the other. The vast majority on the Left said that something like the House Committee bills would most benefit Democrats. A slender majority on the Right said that the passing nothing would most benefit Republicans. I disagreed, and wrote, “The worse the better, from a purely political viewpoint; so passage of something like HR 3200 would be best for Republicans in 2010. But for the physical and fiscal health of the American people, the alternative approaches proposed by Cato and the Independence Institute would be far better.”
The second question asked Left bloggers how worried they are that Democrats are alienating independents. Right bloggers were asked the same question about Republicans. The Left was more worried about this than the Right. This made sense to me, as I wrote “”The national Democrats are alienating independents so fast that the Republicans can’t keep up.”
The final question aksed “On balance, does winning the Nobel Peace Prize help or hurt President Obama’s image at home?” Almost all the Left thought it helped, and most all the Right thought it hurt. I agreed with the latter: “Even the strong Obama supporters who I’ve talked to think the prize was ridiculous. For swing voters, it highlights Obama’s rhetoric/achievement gap. The principle that good intentions and sincere effort are good enough for a Nobel prize suggests that Sarah Palin’s autobiography should win her the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
subpatre says:
The ‘Bills’ and ‘peace prize’ questions highlight a flaw in the rational ignorance theory of voters; people second guess poll questions and give —not what they believe the answer actually is— their desired outcome as the answer.
October 17, 2009, 11:13 amOff Kilter says:
Subpatre: “The ‘Bills’ and ‘peace prize’ questions highlight a flaw in the rational ignorance theory of voters; people second guess poll questions and give —not what they believe the answer actually is— their desired outcome as the answer.”
Since “their desired outcome” is seldom informed as to actual cost, I don’t see why this “highlight[s] a flaw in the rational ignorance theory of voters”.
October 17, 2009, 3:06 pmIndependent says:
If you think polls mean anything today….then you are wrong. If people won’t spend 30 minutes to vote, but hours of complaining, then the country is going to be in big trouble over the nxt 3 years.
I just read a book that was most insightful & I recommend everyone to read it cause it’s based, in part, on real Americans/events in a small town in America that fights federal tyranny. It’s a modern day version of Americans compared to colonist who finally took a stand against King George III. It’s compelling cause the story could be about your hometown or mine nxt year.
1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy;
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage’
It’s superb & it may time that history is once again calling on all of us to make our own history/legacy.
October 17, 2009, 3:56 pmhttp://www.booksbyoliver.com
Bruce Hayden says:
I frankly don’t see any of the bills helping the Democrats in 2010. Yes, it might help on the left, but that isn’t where the Democrats need votes. Rather, it is the middle, and polling seems to indicate that they are almost as upset about how health care “reform” is going down as are those on the right. Part of the problem is that a lot of people are reasonably happy with their current health care plans, and are worried that they will end up with less coverage, and possibly pay more money for it. Also, there is the worry about getting DMV or Post Office level service (what would have happened last Monday if something had gone wrong with you, while the government was taking the day off?) And then there is the money issue – spending this amount of money, and raising taxes, while in the midst of a major recession, and after the “stimulus” bill and the last appropriations bill (full of 8,000 earmarks) is just fiscal insanity.
October 17, 2009, 4:21 pmyankee says:
For better or worse, the vast majority of people will not see the effects a health care bill by 2010, so they won’t be able to credit (or blame) the Democrats for the effects. The Democrats will, however, be able to claim that they “did something” about the problem. If a bill passes, GOP claims that the bill is awful will seem hollow in 2010 since people won’t see any disasters happening (at least not yet).
If nothing passes, the GOP will be able to run against the “do-nothing” Democrats. It’s a classic political technique: obstruct the majority’s agenda, then, at election time, blame the majority for not getting anything done. So passage helps the Democrats; failure helps the Republicans.
I think the health care bill will be a minor factor in any event. The results of the 2010 midterms will mostly hinge on structural factors. If the economy is still bad, people will blame the Democrats; if it recovers, they’ll give the Democrats the credit.
October 17, 2009, 4:39 pmNickM says:
yankee – whether they would see effects depend on when taxes would kick in.
Nick
October 17, 2009, 7:36 pmJoseph Slater says:
I’m not the political prognosticating expert that 90%+ of folks on the internet at least think they are, but I would be completely stunned if the Nobel Peace Prize turned out to be anything other than a complete non-factor one way or another.
October 17, 2009, 9:13 pmLeo Marvin says:
With so many people who know everything, why pay attention to someone who admits he doesn’t?
October 17, 2009, 10:36 pmBruce Hayden says:
This has to be a first. I actually agree with Slater for once.
October 18, 2009, 12:53 amDave N says:
Bruce Hayden,
I also agree with Joseph Slater that the Peace Prize will be a non-factor. The state of the economy, on the other hand. . . .
October 18, 2009, 10:45 amsubpatre says:
In (supposedly) replying to my comment, Off Kilter illustrates exactly what I stated: Many people try to impose their own desired outcomes as answers to poll questions. They may well believe Obama’s Nobel does have an effect, but will say it doesn’t because the outcome is what they want. Restated —and not perfectly accurate— is that people lie to polls in order to favor their perception; what they want to happen.
The rational ignorance theory depends on accepting people’s answers as true. Kopel is correct that the best outcome for the Republican Party is for the Democrats to ram through these bills, yet most of those Republicans polled stated ‘passage of nothing’. That is not ignorance, it is shading the truth to say what these bloggers want (non passage) to happen.
Similarly for Democratic bloggers, passage of any health-care bills in the near future is politically damaging (extremely risky at the least) in the long run, yet it’s what the bloggers want to happen. So instead of stating the obvious about these deeply divisive proposals, they ‘root for’ their side and say that passage of the bills is “the best political outcome”.
October 18, 2009, 12:49 pmLeo Marvin says:
subpatre, why do you assume bias impairs honesty instead of analysis?
October 18, 2009, 4:07 pmsubpatre says:
Leo Marvin asks: “subpatre, why do you assume bias impairs honesty instead of analysis?”
1) Because the poll answers are absurd without that assumption, but make perfect sense with it.
2) Because it is the simplest, most natural, and most reasonable explanation for the extreme divergence of opinions. In the poll Obama’s award of the Nobel prize is either good (84%) or bad (76%) for him; for Obama. Less than 6% thought it was neither, precluding a spectrum.
3) Because I’m a cynic; conducting thousands of interviews and then having to find —and produce— the facts, or lack of, behind those statements. People shade the truth like that about everything.
For further reading, try the Innocence Project and their investigations on the reliability of eyewitnesses.
October 18, 2009, 9:14 pmLeo Marvin says:
This and everything else you said, except for your cynicism, begs the question. It can all just as easily be explained by honestly mistaken beliefs on account of perceptions distorted by bias. Unless you have some actual evidence of the dishonesty you claim, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation: most people believe what they tell you; they just often happen to be wrong.
October 19, 2009, 12:05 amsubpatre says:
Leo Marvin – Bias makes people tell things that objectively are not, indeed cannot be true. You label it perspective, and you could be right; but if so it would then also be true those persons have no knowledge of their own bias; so they are lying to themselves, and believing what they tell the poll.
Occam? LOL Your claim is that people are wrong ~95% of the time, but in many different ways, and Occam says it’s simpler than that, “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity“; exactly what you did. People simply say what they want to happen.
Simple proof is plugging my ‘fibbing’ theory into the results of the polls. That fits, while your concept of distortional perception is bound to have a continuum, not the all-or-nothing results actually received.
October 19, 2009, 1:47 amLeo Marvin says:
First of all, someone can know his own ideological biases without realizing they distort his perception of facts and events. That unawareness isn’t lying. Lying requires an intention to deceive, which can’t be present when someone doesn’t know that what he’s telling himself and the pollster is inaccurate.
I don’t know where you came up with 95%, but it wasn’t from me. You are laying a dishonesty gloss over what we agree is probably a substantial amount of error in the poll answers. Unless you can show evidence for the dishonesty, you are the one who is adding the unnecessary level of complexity.
“[P]lugging [your] fibbing theory into the results of the polls” to prove the polls are the results of fibbing is tautological.
You lost me. What “all-or-nothing results actually received”?
October 19, 2009, 3:09 amThorley Winston says:
It depends. One thing that both the Baucus and the House bill have in common is that the new taxes kick in right away but the subsidies are “phased in” over three or four years in order to give the illusion that they were being fiscally responsible by creating a new program that needed ten years of new taxes and fines to pay for six or seven years of new spending.
This could end up backfiring at the polls in 2010 and 2012 when voters see that that their taxes and health insurance premiums have already gone up but they haven’t gotten any of the subsidies or lower premiums that they were promised.
Of course by then the 25% cut to Medicare providers should have also been undone by Congress so the deficit will explode even further than it has already. So the people who vote for this thing will be voting for higher taxes and higher deficits while the people who are generally satisified with their health insurance will just be paying more for it.
October 19, 2009, 1:37 pmThorley Winston says:
Oh and also by then, Baucus and Obama’s proposed 25% cut to health care providers who treat Medicare patients* will be undone by Congress (like it has before) which means that the largest source of projected “savings” aren’t going to happen. So the already record deficits Obama, Reid and Pelosi are already running will explode even further so Obama gets to go into 2012 with (a) higher taxes (b) higher deficits and (c) higher health insurance premiums after he got elected promising the people who are were satisfied with their health insurance that the only change would be that they would be paying up to $2500 less for their health insurance than they already were.
* Not to mention that even without this cut, more doctors will refuse to take on new Medicare patients right about the time when the baby boomers start to become eligible for Medicare.
October 19, 2009, 1:47 pmsubpatre says:
Leo Marvin says:”First of all, someone can know his own ideological biases without realizing they distort his perception of facts and events
That isn’t bias, idealogical or otherwise. It is wishful thinking; it is what people wanted. When asked a factual question, people answered with what they wanted to be true, not with what they knew had actually happened.
October 20, 2009, 1:35 amLeo Marvin says:
There’s all kinds of biases. Until your last comment we were discussing a poll of bloggers with self-identified ideological biases. In your JFK example any number of factors could cause the bias. What those are, ideological or otherwise, is irrelevant to the issue at hand. And that issue is that you keep making the same unsupported claim that perceptual distortions, current and retrospective, are lies, when they can just as easily be explained by simple human subjectivity. I’m still waiting for some evidence of the dishonesty.
October 20, 2009, 8:05 amsubpatre says:
Leo Marvin writes: “There’s all kinds of biases. Until your last comment we were discussing a poll of bloggers with self-identified ideological biases. In your JFK example any number of factors could cause the bias. What those are, ideological or otherwise, is irrelevant to the issue at hand. And that issue is that you keep making the same unsupported claim that perceptual distortions, current and retrospective, are lies, when they can just as easily be explained by simple human subjectivity. I’m still waiting for some evidence of the dishonesty.”
1) The issue is simple: Whether people answer the actual questions asked, or instead substitute what they want to occur as the answer. Leo Marvin does that himself when he states “Lying requires an intention to deceive . . .” yet the dictionary’s definitions hold both deliberate and non-intentional falsehood; even perjury doesn’t require intent.
2)There is no reason to ass·u·me honest answers to poll questions, yet Marvin does. Why assume any position, truth or falsity, without some logic, reasoning, or evidence? Well, it is what Marvin wants.
3) Replying truthfully to some polls’ questions can be difficult; not easy. On the question of Obama’s Nobel prize, it takes some mental effort to predict how the award actually influenced his image. Only five percent of those polled questioned any change or thought there wasn’t any. Other polls on the President’s popularity confirmed* that was the case; no change one way or the other.
It was easier for most of those polled to answer with that they personally wanted than to puzzle out the actual result.
4) Occam dictates “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”, exactly what Marvin did once again. People were asked a simple, factual question; and they replied with what they wanted to be true about Obama’s Nobel prize. People were asked a simple, factual question; and they replied with what they wanted to be true about voting for John Kennedy. There is no multiplicity or complexity of issues, yet Marvin adds “any number of factors” when presented with another example.
5) Every source that researches memory, witness testimony, and identification consistently comes up with the same result: People’s recall is patched together with that that person wants to remember.
Leo Marvin doesn’t read any of the references —didn’t even bother to read the poll itself— but goes on to claim it’s “honestly mistaken beliefs” or “human subjectivity”. . . that they can’t remember they voted for the other guy! What a load of crap!
6) So indeed, Leo Marvin will never be shown “evidence of the dishonesty”, because by falsely claiming some specific definition, he clings to what he wants. Have at it Mr. Marvin.
.
October 20, 2009, 11:54 pm*Yep! I know, but these are polls asking “What do you want” or “How do you feel” about Obama, and are easier to get accurate answers than polls asking hard, factual, or material questions.
Leo Marvin says:
subpatre,
Since your latest position is that lying doesn’t require an intention to deceive, you shouldn’t mind if I characterize your many misstatements of my position as lying, right? I have neither the time nor inclination to correct all your distortions of what I said, nor all the errors in your argument. I’ll let the thread speak for itself.
October 21, 2009, 1:24 am