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Do These Poll Numbers Conform to Your Experience?
I’m looking at the results of a CNN/ORC poll released a few hours ago and finding some of the results truly bewildering. Go have a close look at those numbers, then come back and tell me what’s going on back home, because I’m confused. I’m not surprised at all that Trump has (by far) the highest name recognition. Nor am I surprised that this translates into “approval.” It’s the rest of it I don’t get.
Should I be as surprised as I am that 43 percent responded that they’d never heard of Carly Fiorina? Their view of her was neither “favorable” nor “unfavorable.” It was “never heard of her.” More than half the country (give or take a sampling error of about five percent) has never heard of Scott Walker. No name recognition at all.
Does that sound right to you? I wonder how many of the candidates — Trump apart — are better known outside of the US than in it? I suspect that in many countries, quite a number of them would be. I’d be curious to see the polls.
This baffles me, too: Republicans (not all voters surveyed) were asked, “Do you think Republicans have a better chance of winning the presidency in 2016 if Donald Trump is the party’s nominee, or do they have a better chance of winning with someone else as the party’s nominee?” They answered:
Better chance with D. Trump 38%
Better chance with someone else 58%
No opinion 4%
(Sampling Error +/-4.5)
I don’t know how much overlap there is among the group of people who think Trump would vastly outperform all the other candidates in every other domain about which they were asked and the group that overwhelmingly doesn’t think he can be elected, but clearly, there’s a lot of overlap.
Go back to Fiorina, again. Look at “never heard of her” by age bracket: 18-34, 61%. 35-49, 46%. 50-63, 33%. 65+, 28%. I’m singling out Fiorina because I can understand voters feeling that all these guys are sort of a blur, or getting confused about who’s who, but find it hard to imagine that so few Americans even know the name of the only woman in the bunch.
And what’s up with the 18-34 age bracket? Why are people in that bracket so much less likely to recognize these names?
If you were to step outside, walk down the street, and ask people the questions these pollsters asked, do you think people around you would reply the same way? If so, why? If not, why not?
Published in Elections, General, Politics
Unless it’s on Snapchat or “The Daily Show” that demographic is not going to see it.
The interviews with the “man in the street” on simple history or civics is frightening.
to #22 EJ Hill – you are not alone -you just described my family’s kids, neighbors, what I hear on talk shows – parents are trying to keep their kids heads on straight – the wave of trash and garbage via Internet, porn, TV, social media obsession, lack of respect, entitlement attitude – it is everywhere – the “family” has the biggest challenge so politics are low priority right now – Obama just launched heroin treatment focus – it is an epidemic in small town America – rich, poor, educated or not – unreal! This is our country. God bless the parents.
Off the top of my head, the FNS “debates” had about five million viewers for the first pass, the bottom six or seven candidates, and about 25 million for the top 10 candidates. In a country with more than 300 million people, 25 million is not a lot of viewers. The upshot? Virtually no debate, just sound bites. If someone wanted to see who is running on the Republican side, they could see them, but not much more.
The GOP is not much, but its all the conservatives have.
I call myself a proud conservative but a disgruntled Republican.
I go with the argument that most answers to pollsters at this point are strategic – voters know polls mean nothing at this point and their answers are to either move the debate in their direction or show their contempt for politics as usual. That’s why we had Michelle Bachman or Herman Cain leading, it’s why Ben Carson is at the top of the pack right now. I wrote yesterday about how Howard Dean caught fire with the Democrats that were looking for the Democrat Wing of the Democrat Party when none of the milquetoast politicians would criticize our war motives while our troops were under fire. Dean said to hell with propriety I want to win and that is what people see in Trump on our side, Sanders on the left.
What the others said. Actually, the real wonder is why so many people pay attention at all. Economists have written papers on this – why do so many people care about politics, and why do so many people vote?
If you think about it, unless maybe you are an op-ed writer for a major newspaper, the possibility of you actually influencing a national election is almost zero. The chance that your vote changes a national election is approximately zero. Even if you push an election over the line for ‘your’ candidate, the actual benefit that will directly come to you is likely to be small.
From a practical cost/benefit standpoint, our behavior makes no sense. Certainly not in the sense of value gained for time spent.
So, you have to look at other motivations for being involved in politics. For some, politics is like sports or a hobby – they get involved because they are passionate about it and enjoy debating, following favoured candidates, etc. For others, it’s a way of venting frustration. For still others it’s a means of signalling tribal affiliation – you proudly put your ‘Trump 2016’ bumper sticker right next to the one showing Calvin peeing on a Ford emblem.
I think this is especially true at this time in a campaign. Most people just aren’t thinking about this stuff at all right now. They’ll pay attention once the race is down to a small group of people and there is some real drama attached to primary votes and such. Then they’ll tune in for entertainment. But the large majority of the country won’t pay serious attention to the actual politics until the Presidential campaign itself kicks off.
Looked at this way, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders make total sense, as did Palin back in 2007. Only the frustrated, the angry and the hobbyists are paying attention right now, and the candidates that are leading are ones pushing all the buttons of the angry, frustrated early audience.
My hope is that when the primary season kicks off, the normal people will start paying attention, and they’ll be the ones to say, “Donald Trump? That blowhard from The Apprentice? Are you freaking kidding me? No way!” Then they’ll make a mental note to vote for candidate B and go back to reading facebook, watching the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or whatever it is that normal people read and watch. I haven’t been one for so long I can’t remember (-:
A lot of what upsets me about the Trump candidacy is that it is taking attention away from candidates like Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina. If Trump weren’t there, the media would be focusing on the candidates that (at this point) only die-hard political followers are aware of.
So yes, this makes perfect sense.
I’d like to reiterate the point about catching up. I think we have a bias toward more engagement being better. This is evident in the frequent references to the low information voter.
But what does more information mean? I suspect most often it means one has more reasons to vote for the guy they like. That is, if you have a gut liking for Jeb and spend 6 months evaluating the field you probably just end up with a long list of reasons you like Jeb and another list of reasons you don’t like the others. The guy who waits until the last minute and also gets a good gut about Jeb just has a shorter list.
I think lots of normal people fall into that last category.
Except if everyone ignored politics, we would quickly find ourselves being governed in much the same way North Korea is governed. I take my responsibility seriously to learn about candidates, donate and campaign for ones I care about, and vote in every election, simply to do my part as a barrier against tyranny.
(And last election cycle, my governor won by 44,000 votes. I’m glad for every dollar I donated, every phone call I made, and bringing a voter registration form to my sister in college, because, yeah, it makes a big difference to have Charlie Baker and not Martha Coakley.)
Bridget,
Very much. Walker, Rubio, Fiorina, Cruz are bright able people with something to say and are very good at saying it. Trump is a reality show.
Regards,
Jim
I actually think that’s a good thing. Let these people simmer a little bit rather than popping in and out of favor week to week. Trump helps keep the lid on.
On the other hand, if the stability of our country also relies on the majority of citizens being highly-informed political junkies who spend 6+ hours every week studying the issues and the candidates, we are also doomed.
It is impossible to expect a huge country to be so well informed, and even were that not the case, the opportunity costs (time lost paying attention to politics) would be staggering.
This is one of the beauties of a republican system of government: the average citizen only elects a few officeholders, and delegates the job of policy expert and government watchdog to those representatives.
Per my previous point, that’s why I dislike Donald Trump: he takes so much air out of the room that normal people aren’t aware of our deep bench of superstars.
I disagree: we never delegate the responsibility of “government watchdog.” We limit the opportunities for tyranny by checks and balances, but an informed electorate is necessary. I’m also confused how you don’t see any gray area between people who spent 6+ hours a day thinking about policy and those who are ignorant. Read instead of watch TV, and you can consume about five hours of talking-heads information in the time it takes you to drink your coffee.
This is true. Most my family and friends think my attention to politics is an unhealthy waste of time. TPB are going to do what they want no matter what us plebes want so why worry about or spend effort on something you can not influence. I am starting to suspect they are right and all my paying attention, supporting candidates, etc is a waste of effort.
I also think this is why Trump is getting support. The plebes are having fun, because in the end they know it will not matter and the PTB will elect who they want anyway.
Is he the 7th Brady Bunch kid?
and no one but HRC, Sanders, and Trump have been getting much ink, or mention…right?
The news media do a great disservice this early in the game by declaring ‘front’ runners.’ In front of what? The next 12 months?
I can’t disagree with that feeling either.
What happens to Jeb!’s war chest if he drops out of the primary?
except that the representatives put their finger to the wind of polls to make decisions.
Sure, in my grade school I recall a mock Bush v. Dukakis debate. What you describe are the types of things mainstream middle-class Americans will do in October — not this October, but next October, 2016. The actual Election Year.
Compare it to football: everyone watches the Super Bowl. Lots of people watch regular season games every Sunday. Hardcore fans watch their team’s preseason games. If you’re the type of fan who obsessively follows mock drafts and studies player stats in the offseason in preparation for your Fantasy Football draft, you’re — let’s face it — a little weird.
If you’re the kind of person who can name all 17 GOP candidates before the first debate a full 15 months before the election, you’re just as weird — no offense to present company!
Yes, it doesn’t surprise me.
I was talking to someone recently — someone I can say pretty certainly is a Republican, someone I’d expect to vote in the primary and who probably keeps some sort of eye on the news.
We somehow were discussing public education in the upper Midwest, which led me to refer to how very politicized it has been in Wisconsin lately. I said something or other about the governor running for president. She’d never heard of him.
If I were to guess, I suspect she knows vaguely who Jeb Bush is and likely Ben Carson (who seems to get a lot of “shares” in certain social media circles), but probably not Cruz, Jindal, Fiorina, etc.
But she’s a serious person. I don’t know how she decides how to vote — whether she watches the debates, listens to people she trusts, reads up on the candidates, or what.
In a workplace discussion that bent political today, it quickly became apparent that out of the 13 people in the office today, I was the only one who had heard of Carly Fiorina. It seems especially egregious since we’ve been an HP partner for a decade . . . .
The only person other than me who knew who Scott Walker was is a “proud Democrat” who hates him for “holding down the little guy” (read: breaking public worker unions), and two of my co-workers think that Bernie Sanders is the “only serious candidate.”
Sometimes I feel the need to weep for my country.
On the other hand, I don’t work with anyone who would vote for Trump.
It’s a big country, too, and that “pulse” is different from one state to another, as you know.
I moved from one purple state to another recently. On a very shallow examination, they’re very similar politically and with some economic similarities to boot. But the political culture and political momentum is completely different.
The local conservative media seems to be of a completely different quality, too.
Well, THAT’S a relief. :)
I’d confidently say, “Of course that’s what will happen,” except I would have confidently said Trump could never get this far and that Sanders could never in a million years shoot up in the polls. I think the message I should take from that is a little humility: Until I really understand just how they’ve both got as far as they have, any why, I need to get out of the confident predictions business. Confident predictions about my own country, anyway.
Weird thing is — and I can’t tell you how disturbing and unsettling it is to realize this – I now feel less good at gauging the mood and peoples’ concerns in the US than I do in France or most other EU countries right now, or Turkey. A weird, weird, feeling, because I’m not French. I’m not anything but American, and never will be anything but American.
But if you’d told me two months ago that Trump and Sanders would be polling the way they are now, I’m sure I would have said something slightly patronizing to you (assuming you were’t American) and given you a what I would have thought would be a helpful, introductory, informal lecture about “American history, culture, celebrity, and politics.”
But instead I’m asking, “I wonder where can I find that guy who delivered my washing machine again? Because he was like Paul the Octopus — he predicted all of this! — and I really want to know what’s going to happen next.” I wish I’d talked to him more and learned where he gets his news, and how he came to those conclusions, and whether it was just a fluke or whether he can do it reliably.
Yes, of course you’re right. My memories of all of these things are of events that took place much closer to the date of the election. I wish I trusted my memory better or had more of them to examine. Seems to me we discussed politics a lot in school, and not just immediately prefatory to elections. But I can’t pull up and date a specific memory to substantiate my sense of this: I could be playing mix-and-match with my memories; it wasn’t as if I was taking careful notes.
I do — vividly — remember the hostage crisis and know everyone around me was talking about that. Watergate, too.
I guess. It just seems so unhealthy to me that we naturally reach for sports as a comparison. Clearly, I’d say, quite a number of people are responding to these candidates because they feel that politics has become an elite game. I guess Ricochet must be precisely what they hate: We’re a narrow, little, elite. Not quite how I saw myself or what we’re trying to achieve, here.
That is weird — though she left in 2005, so it wouldn’t be as weird if you told me that most of the people in your office had been working there for less than a decade. Is that roughly right?
John Hendrix: The GOP is not much, but its all the conservatives have.
True, most people haven’t been there that long, but I knew who she was even before I started working there because she was a fairly well known name in business and technology news. It never occurred to me before today that a company full of IT experts and business process consultants could claim that they had never heard of a candidate for President who also happened to be the first female CEO of a Fortune 100 company which happened to be one of our direct partnes.
I mean, you’d think at least some of them might have picked it up from a tech site, industry magazine, or a blog, no?
Claire, have you been following the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK?
That seems relevant, and perhaps more disturbing than the rise of Trump or Sanders, who are still pulling far less than a majority. There seems to be, at the very least, a similar disregard for the probable electoral consequences of voting for the crazy guy.
I know to some degree what you mean, that you feel like you’ve lost that sense of what is really going on. I’m not British, but I spent enough years in the UK to feel surprised and slightly disoriented by, first, the rise of the Scottish Nationalists and now watching the party that swept to victory three times under Tony Blair rushing headlong in the opposite direction.
As for Trump, I think the basic ingredients were there in 2012 as well. There was a huge, loyal fan base pushing for a Palin run — and when she didn’t, they were left really without a candidate. And then there was the Gingrich surge, until he fell apart under heavy attack by Bush.
I think I might know voters who would give Trump’s name to a pollster right now. I doubt I know very many who will actually pull the lever for him, once he’s faced sustained criticism on the actual issues. The one thing that leaves me surprised in all this is how much the conservative media is playing along and building him up.