Zogby Poll No Joke

[frazzledgear]

Zogby International

The Zogby poll among Obama voters showed some disturbing results -especially regarding the selective reporting the blatantly biased media did in their efforts to get Obama elected since so many were truly ignorant about the candidates. The poll was not a joke and it was NOT a "push poll" as some critics have claimed. A push-poll is one designed to get respondents to most likely give the answer most desired. For instance -a question like "if you knew that Candidate X opposed allowing people to purchase the healthcare policy of their choice and seeing the doctor of their choice, would you be more in favor of voting for him or less likely to vote for him?" -is a push-poll question. You propose something negative about a candidate and then ask the person if that makes them more likely to want to vote for him or not. The fact that Candidate X never said any such thing is irrelevant -it leaves the person with the impression he did -and the individual already thinking he is less likely to vote for the guy as a result.

The very nature of the questions in this poll plus the fact they were given multiple choices including the option of choosing "none" -rules out it being a push-poll. They were given factual situations that involved one candidate or certain comments made by one candidate -and asked which candidate it was about or said it -and allowed respondents to choose Obama, Biden, McCain, Palin or "none of them".

The 12 question multiple choice survey found questions regarding negative situations and statements linked to McCain or Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters -than negative situations and statements associated with Obama or Biden.

94% of Obama voters correctly identified Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenager and 86% correctly identified Palin as the candidate associated with the $150,000 wardrobe purchased by her political party and 81% correctly identified McCain as the candidate who couldn't immediately identify how many houses he owned.

Incredibly, when asked who said they "could see Russia" from their house -87% of Obama voters said Palin said it. Tina Fey said it in a skit on Saturday Night Live -Palin never said it.

On the other hand -83% failed to correctly name Obama when asked which candidate won their first election by getting all their opponents removed from the ballot. 88% failed to identify Obama as the candidate who said his energy policies would likely bankrupt the US coal industry.

56% failed to correctly name Obama as the candidate who started his political career at the home of two former Weatherman Underground members.

72% of Obama voters did not know it was Biden who had to quit a previous campaign for the Presidency because he had plagiarized a speech and another 47% did not know it was Biden who said that Obama would be tested by an international crisis during his first six months in office.

A big stunner -57% of Obama voters incorrectly identified which party controlled both houses of Congress before the election -and said Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.

In other words -the majority of those who voted for Obama, were pretty darn ignorant about the guy. And the media did all it could to make sure as many people as possible remained that way. But the media can't be totally blamed -the fact that 57% of Obama voters didn't know which party already controlled both houses of Congress is ignorance of their own choosing and no big secret.

 

[Lycurgus]

Sad isn't it? ............... & Scary!

 

[DiveCon]

interesting
so Obama was running push polls
i wonder how many of those on this board that were claiming Bush did them will now pooh pooh Obama being caught red handed

 

[jillian]

interesting
so Obama was running push polls
i wonder how many of those on this board that were claiming Bush did them will now pooh pooh Obama being caught red handed

Well, it WAS a push poll, but it wasn't Obama's. It was a right wingnuts's pushpoll which, I think everyone is kind of surprised that Zogby would destroy his reputation to do...

Zogby’s Misleading Poll of Obama Voters
During a campaign, pollsters can build credibility by forecasting election results accurately. Afterward, they can build revenue by using that credibility to attract private clients. These private surveys often have an agenda, and their numbers can’t be tested against an objective standard, such as votes. Such surveys can test pollsters’ standards of conduct.


Zogby International recently conducted a survey for a critic of president-elect Barack Obama and then, together with the sponsor, interpreted the numbers from the survey in a misleading fashion.

John Zogby, the president and chief executive of Zogby International, released a statement on his Web site Tuesday that defended the poll in the face of heavy criticism from bloggers and some media organizations, saying, “We stand by the results [of] our survey work on behalf of [author and former talk show host] John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. … We were hired to test public opinion on a particular subject and with no ax to grind, that’s exactly what we did.”

But on Wednesday, Zogby told me he was on a book tour* when the contract was reached and when the survey was conducted, and wouldn’t have approved the poll in the form it took, or a press release posted on his firm’s Web site. “This was not Zogby International’s finest hour,” he said. “Something, somehow, fell through the cracks.” He said he would review the incident with his staff on Friday to determine what went wrong. Nonetheless, Zogby stood by the results of the poll themselves. “There is valuable information in this poll,” he said.

The survey’s sponsor, Ziegler, has created a Web site called How Obama Got Elected that says the Democratic senator’s victory was made possible by the news media, which failed to inform voters of Obama’s shortcomings and those of his running mate, Joe Biden. The survey was meant to bolster that argument, also to be presented in a documentary by Ziegler, “Media Malpractice…How Obama Got Elected.”

To conduct the survey, Ziegler turned to Zogby, a firm that has had some success in presidential-election polling but also has conducted some questionable sponsored surveys. Zogby posed 12 questions to 512 Obama voters last week, then ran the results this week on its site with the sub-headline “Survey finds most Obama voters remembered negative coverage of McCain/Palin statements but struggled to correctly answer questions about coverage associated with Obama/Biden.”

The press release highlighted that at least 80% of Obama voters knew that Palin had a pregnant teenage daughter and was the candidate associated with a $150,000 wardrobe, and that McCain was unable to identify the number of houses he owned. Meanwhile, more than 80% didn’t know unflattering facts about Obama, such as his successful efforts to have opponents removed from the ballot in his first political race and his comments that critics have interpreted to mean his energy policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry.

Here’s an alternative way of presenting the findings that’s at least as valid. There were 10 questions that were meant to be answered with the name of one of the candidates. Five of them covered events that had surfaced in the three months before the election: McCain’s inability to say how many homes he owned; Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter; Palin’s wardrobe budget; Obama’s intent to redistribute wealth; and Biden’s comment that Obama would be tested by an international crisis. On those questions, more than half of Obama voters correctly identified the involved candidate (the percentage for the last question was lowest, at 53.3%; on the others, it was in the 80s).

The other five questions covered events or comments during the primary or from decades ago, including Obama’s first campaign and a Biden presidential bid in 1987 done in by charges of plagiarism in law school and on the campaign trail. On four of these questions, the correct answer was chosen more frequently than the other three candidates combined, but many voters — on some questions, most — were unsure. On three questions, fewer than 25% of respondents got the right answer, prompting Ziegler to tell Fox News “that a group of monkeys if they had been guessing would have done better than Obama voters” on those questions, not because Obama voters were unintelligent but because they were misinformed.

On the fifth question about older events, “Which candidate said their policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket?”, more voters named McCain than Obama. However, Obama’s cited comments — made in January in a meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board — referred to bankrupting new coal plants, not the industry. He was speaking about a cap-and-trade system for emissions, something that McCain also has supported.

“We wrote ‘likely’ because of that very caveat,” Ziegler told me. “We had to simplify it, and I stand by the simplification of the question.”

Noting the dated Biden plagiarism question, Ann Selzer, a pollster in Des Moines, said, “It’s not at all surprising Obama supporters do not know this fact. I would guess a similar number of McCain supporters do not know this fact.”

Ziegler agreed that people may have done worst on questions referring to older events. “I think that that’s true, and I think that’s part of the reason there was a disparity there,” he said. “It also goes to the point that the news media ignored the history of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.” When asked why he didn’t include questions referring to unfavorable aspects of McCain’s and Palin’s distant past, he said, “I felt that these were the best 12 for what I was trying to accomplish.”

Ziegler told Fox News that he spent about $13,000 on the poll and on a related short film, both of which will be used in his documentary. On Fox, he challenged liberals to sponsor a similar poll of McCain supporters. He told me he was sure McCain backers would do better: “They got their information from a completely different type of media, one that was not totally in the tank for Barack Obama.”

Zogby said he wouldn’t have approved the poll without including McCain supporters. “A more honest poll would have been conducted had we also focused on McCain people,” he said. He added that some of the questions weren’t worded fairly.

(On Thursday, Politico reported that Ziegler contacted Zogby this week to repeat the poll with McCain supporters but was rebuffed by the polling firm. John Zogby said he would want to formulate the questions and have either an objective sponsor or a pair of sponsors, one from the left and one from the right. Ziegler responded, “This didn’t fall through any ‘cracks,’ they just got scared. … there was nothing wrong with the original poll.” After publication of this post, Ziegler wrote a comment objecting to the headline.)

One of the other two poll questions referred to Tina Fey’s send-up of Palin — “Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?” — rather than Palin herself; none of the four candidates was the right answer. The other question asked, simply, whether respondents could name which party controlled Congress before this month’s election. Just 43% correctly responded that the Democrats did, with 21% answering neither or saying they were unsure. Fox’s Sean Hannity called that “frightening,” but it may have said less about Obama voters’ knowledge than about all voters’ knowledge; just 53% of all respondents, from both parties, got a similar question right in a Pew poll in May that I wrote about last month.

Apart from the exclusion of McCain supporters and whether the poll’s questions were representative of overall campaign knowledge, the poll didn’t demonstrate that the news media favored Obama, or that any media distortions “got Obama elected.” No questions addressed how voters got their information or how the answers to the questions influenced their vote. It may well be that supporters of each candidate gravitate toward media that downplay the shortcomings of their own candidates and highlight those of opponents — or simply that they retain knowledge that conforms with their world view.

As the Washington Times aptly put it, the poll “essentially revealed that [Obama] voters remembered good stuff about the president-elect and bad stuff about Sen. John McCain’s campaign.”

“Maybe one of the questions this should raise is to what extent the mainstream media has the power to reach the average voter,” Ziegler said. Nonetheless, he said he was confident the media won Obama the election. “Would Obama have won without the media being in the tank for him? No. He would never have won the nomination. He is completely a media creation.”

Zogby’s record includes some electoral-forecasting success and some controversy. In 2000, Zogby was among the more accurate national pollsters. In 2004, the firm incorrectly forecast the race for Sen. John Kerry on Election Day. This year, as I noted in a column earlier this month, Zogby was among the top pollsters in state polls, though it also whiffed badly on the California Democratic primary.

Between elections, Zogby has conducted research for online-gambling advocates that the head of a polling professional association told me was “loaded and biased,” and started a survey about voters’ concerns of potential corruption in a Hillary Clinton White House with the statement “Some people believe that the Bill Clinton administration was corrupt.”

Though Zogby has defended those surveys, he also admits that at times bad polls get through the firm’s safeguards. For instance, a 2001 poll sponsored by a liberal Web site told respondents that a candidate for a White House position had “pleaded guilty to the crime of lying to Congress,” then asked, “Do you think that someone who admitted to deceiving Congress should or should not be appointed to a top level White House position?” Not surprisingly, three-quarters of respondents said no. After Opinion Journal’s James Taranto criticized the question as “misleading and tendentious,” Zogby said, “I quickly backed off and apologized. It was a terrible question. It was wrong. These things do happen. We would like to believe they happen very rarely.”

Further reading: The poll was not, as election forecaster and Obama supporter Nate Silver originally called it, a “push poll,” because it was not an attempt to influence respondents by faking opinion research, as former pollster Mark Blumenthal explained on his blog. Blumenthal nonetheless agreed with Silver’s other criticisms, writing, “Describing his biased, leading questions as a legitimate test of knowledge is hugely misleading, at best.” Silver posted the transcript of his heated interview with Ziegler. Ziegler responded to his critics and to Zogby’s decision not to conduct the same poll with McCain voters.

*This blog post originally and incorrectly stated that John Zogby was on vacation when this poll was conducted. He was on a book tour.

The Numbers Guy : Zogby's Misleading Poll of Obama Voters

 

[bk1983]

interesting
so Obama was running push polls
i wonder how many of those on this board that were claiming Bush did them will now pooh pooh Obama being caught red handed

How does Zogby=Obama?? Where has Obama run push polls?

 

[jillian]

How does Zogby=Obama?? Where has Obama run push polls?

Not to mention that I'm not sure how one would equate a right winger's push poll with something Obama did.

And this is the third thread posted on this push poll anyway... and three times it's been shown to be trash...

yet they keep posting it.

You'd think they'd be embarrassed.

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Not to mention that I'm not sure how one would equate a right winger's push poll with something Obama did.

And this is the third thread posted on this push poll anyway... and three times it's been shown to be trash...

yet they keep posting it.

You'd think they'd be embarrassed.

Yet you do not mind at all when someone runs 15 different threads on the same thing a Republican did. Or 10 on Bush or 10 on McCain. Go figure.

 

[jillian]

Yet you do not mind at all when someone runs 15 different threads on the same thing a Republican did. Or 10 on Bush or 10 on McCain. Go figure.

Oh no, the horror... I pointed out that this pathetic excuse for political discussion had been debunked twice before. ... the horror!

Besides, a wingnut financed push poll really isn't news because it doesn't say anything anyway.

 

[DiveCon]

Well, it WAS a push poll, but it wasn't Obama's. It was a right wingnuts's pushpoll which, I think everyone is kind of surprised that Zogby would destroy his reputation to do...



The Numbers Guy : Zogby's Misleading Poll of Obama Voters

sorry, the poll zogby did wasnt the push poll

 

[jillian]

sorry, the poll zogby did wasnt the push poll

The poll described in the OP was the Zogby poll and was a push poll.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Zogby Engages in Apparent Push Polling for Right-Wing Website

unless I'm missing what you're referring to.

 

[Jon]

The poll described in the OP was the Zogby poll and was a push poll.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Politics Done Right: Zogby Engages in Apparent Push Polling for Right-Wing Website

unless I'm missing what you're referring to.

Wait...a liberally biased website claims a "wingnut's" poll is a push-poll? There's a shocker.

You're worse than the pollsters in your bias.

Ironically, I see no push-polling. The questions are legitimate.

 

[Missourian]

Wouldn't it be somewhat counterintuitive to conduct a push-poll after the election has already been decided? What would be the point?

 

[Gord]

Here is Zogby's defense of his poll and his definition of a push poll:

"We stand by the results our survey work on behalf of John Ziegler, as we stand by all of our work. We reject the notion that this was a push poll because it very simply wasn't. It was a legitimate effort to test the knowledge of voters who cast ballots for Barack Obama in the Nov. 4 election. Push polls are a malicious effort to sway public opinion one way or the other, while message and knowledge testing is quite another effort of public opinion research that is legitimate inquiry and has value in the public square. In this case, the respondents were given a full range of responses and were not pressured or influenced to respond in one way or another." - John Zogby

 

[xsited1]

Obama supporters should be treated with respect. I've met several in the past few days and they were all very pleasant. Here's what some of them said to me:

"Would you like fries with that?"
"A Gingersnap Latte and an Espresso Truffle. Will that be all?"
"Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart."
"Gimme your watch and your wallet and I won't kill you!"
"Would you like to upgrade your carwash to a super-deluxe?"

 

[Missourian]

Obama supporters should be treated with respect. I've met several in the past few days and they were all very pleasant. Here's what some of them said to me:

"Would you like fries with that?"
"A Gingersnap Latte and an Espresso Truffle. Will that be all?"
"Thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart."
"Gimme your watch and your wallet and I won't kill you!"
"Would you like to upgrade your carwash to a super-deluxe?"

"You must spread some reputation around...."

 

[DiveCon]

Wouldn't it be somewhat counterintuitive to conduct a push-poll after the election has already been decided? What would be the point?

no shit, jillian is too partisan to understand THAT simple concept

 

[Gord]

What is really scary about this poll is that there are liberals like those on this board who actually knew how terrible a candidate Obama was, and they still voted for him...

 

[Shogun]

What is really scary about this poll is that there are liberals like those on this board who actually knew how terrible a candidate Obama was, and they still voted for him...

i bet if you cry and stomp your foot for about four years you'll make real headway in '12!

 

[DiveCon]

i bet if you cry and stomp your foot for about four years you'll make real headway in '12!

it worked for you guys




but we wont need to
the reality of what you morons did will be exposed

 

[Shogun]

it worked for you guys

but we wont need to
the reality of what you morons did will be exposed

yea, and look how quickly your pony is being shed as if his tenure was a fruedian nightmare. Hell, even W sticker having conservatives are jumping ship and pretending to never have voted like we all know you did!

dream on, sucker. you have the relevance of a ruby ridge standoff. I would suggest you do like your rhetoric requested in 04 and TRY to figure out how to come to terms with your new president.