Late last month, I blogged (emphasis added):
Julian Sanchez at Reason‘s Hit & Run reports:
The American Family Association is running a meaningless online poll on attitudes about gay marriage which, they say, they’ll be sending to Congress. Presumably, they thought selection bias (who goes to the AFA website, after all?) would yield a huge margin against gay marriage. Except, so far, it’s not quite working out. I’m dying to see them forced to send a “petition” to Congress showing upwards of 60 percent support for gay marriage, with another 8 to 10 favoring at least civil unions. That, or watching them try to weasel out of doing so. Have fun. (Hat tip: Amy Phillips.)
Makes sense to me — people who run meaningless online polls (and who, I suspect, were intending to promote the poll as if it were meaningful) deserve to have them equally meaninglessly backfire.
UPDATE: As I expected, there was an obviously non-AFA e-mail circulating urging supporters of gay marriage to vote at the AFA site; a reader was kind enough to forward it to me. (The e-mail also said that it was urging people to vote whatever their views, since “The point here is to have a LEGITIMATE cross section of people voting in this poll”; but even if this claim was sincere, it was unsound, since no matter who got the e-mail and acted on it, the result would almost certainly not be a “legitimate cross section” in the sense of a representative cross section.)
So the AFA wanted a poll that was unrepresentative because it mostly reflected the views of the unrepresentative chunk of the population that visits the AFA site. Instead, it got a poll that was unrepresentative because it largely reflected the views of the unrepresentative chunk of the population that got the e-mail. Bunk either way, but at least the way it turned out it’s bunk that hoisted the original would-be bunk perpetrators with their own petard.
Survey says . . . weaseling out. Wired News reports (thanks again to Sanchez at Hit & Run for the pointer) that
[AFA representative Buddy Smith said:] “It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll — it was forwarded to them — and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that.”
Of course, no such poll can be said to represent an accurate picture of popular opinion. But, clearly, the AFA had hoped Congress would take the numbers it planned to produce as exactly that kind of evidence.
Now, Smith says, his organization has had to abandon its goal of taking the poll to Capitol Hill.
“We made the decision early on not to do that,” Smith admitted, “because of how, as I say, the homosexual activists around the country have done their number on it.”
Oh, how horrible! Those “homosexual activists” have “done their number” on the poll, so it represents what “the homosexual activists” believe, as opposed to what the anti-homosexual activists believe. At least I like the candor: The gay activists have tried “to cause [the poll] to represent something other than what we [the AFA] wanted to.” Not other than an accurate estimate of public views, which the AFA poll would never have yielded — just other than what the AFA wanted.
Now naturally the AFA is perfectly entitled not to report these results to Congress. And we’re perfectly entitled to be amused by how perfectly their plan backfired. ‘Tis the sport, indeed.
Comments are closed.