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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
This sort of poll is meaningless at this stage of an election cycle. Nobody outside Ricochet’s cloister of wonks and wonk wannabes gives a patootie about the elections or campaigns.
Be surprised that Fiorina ss that well known; she certainly is. She’s been out of the spotlight since her days with HP, and only investors are likely to have heard of her then. Her failed, and utterly unchallenging campaign against Boxer also was not widely reported.
The press really resented Walker’s successes against the unions; he wasn’t widely reported outside WI, IL, IN.
There’s a lot of anger against DC and against a Republican establishment that doesn’t walk on the Right Wing’s (as opposed to Tea Party) water. Trump’s blunt, if mendacious, chatter appeals to them.
18-34 don’t care about the world around them, and don’t know enough about it to understand the value of caring sooner rather than later. That’s not just this generation of kids, it’s all generations of that age cohort.
Yep. It’s too early. People are worried about getting into tomorrow from today. Economy, jobs, work if they have a job, pick an excuse. It’s always something, no matter the election cycle. See how the polls shift as the primaries get going, and see how the polls shift again after both party conventions.
It’s your job to be immersed in this stuff, and it’s our pleasure to be immersed in it. But we’re a cloistered gang, not at all typical of the outside world.
Eric Hines
That’s not Trump’s doing; that’s the other candidates not pressing their positions and solutions, but instead answering the Press’ questions about Trump.
They need to learn from Elizabeth Warren.
Eric Hines
There’s no there there; Sanders is nowhere in the polls. Sanders is only polling well with the white, liberal, left end of the base. He’s got no minority support. He’s building no cross-section of support. He’s a protest vote, a vote against Clinton, a vote of embarrassment about Clinton, a vote for socialism, a vote for Sanders’ refreshing honesty. But it’s not a vote for Sanders.
Sanders will have 10% of the Democrat delegates and two states when the convention opens. You heard it here first.
Eric Hines
I have, and as one British friend said to me, “It sounds as if your Republicans are like Labour, they’re making such a joke of themselves that no one’s ever going to take them seriously again.” She said this about a month ago, and I (as usual) thought, “Oh, what do you know about American politics.” Now I wonder if she was more prescient than I realized and if I was in denial.
I was going to write about just this, today. Boris Johnson had a piece in the Telegraph about how Conservatives just couldn’t believe their luck — Corbyn was making Labour permanently irrelevant. I didn’t because the article’s behind a paywall, and I tend to avoid linking to things behind paywalls. But I’m sure there’s an equal sense of glee in the high ranks of the Democratic Party.
This sense is very recent. It’s possible I never knew my own country as well as I thought I did, but never (until these past few years) did I have the feeling that I didn’t. Feelings aren’t facts, of course, but I’ll freely confess to finding this a deeply disconcerting feeling.
Yes, and on this one, clearly, I didn’t know Britain as well as I thought I did. Thatcher considered the permanent reform of the Labour Party one of her greatest achievements. Now it’s seriously talking about bringing back Clause IV.
I’m watching the Labour leadership race with particular curiosity because I suspect it’s probably a good bellwether: If he wins the Labour race — and it looks from the polls as if he might — then it’s time to take very seriously the idea that voters in Western democracies, including ours, care more about nominating protest candidates than winning elections. I’m not sure whether this has a lot of precedent, or what exactly it means.
I don’t think there’s any way we could know.
Doesn’t surprise me — he’s like Cecil the Lion; a story about him guarantees a reader will click on it. So whether you like him or not, if you’re in business and working on a profit model, he’s irresistible.
And their snout in the trough for money.
Keep in mind that we hold our elections on a strict clock schedule, not at the Prime Minister’s convenience within a band of dates. That has a serious impact when our two electorates start gearing up for an election. Corbyn may well damage Labour; nor Trump nor Sanders are likely to damage their parties.
Eric Hines
I think a lot of us are feeling that. I live in Alberta, and have been proudly telling people for a long time that we are not only the most conservative people in Canada, but perhaps in North America. We haven’t elected a non-conservative government in decades. We have no provincial sales tax, a small flat income tax, and the Fraser/Cato economic freedom index last year rated Alberta as the most economically free place in North America.
This year, we threw out the Conservatives and elected a left-wing progressive government with a large majority. Never saw that coming.
Which is understandable — but a citizen shouldn’t feel that way. The future is unpredictable. There’s some non-zero chance he becomes PM.
The SNP shocked me more, honestly. Scotland was Labour and had been since the beginning of time (well, not quite) and would always be Labour. Independence wasn’t a serious discussion. Even the more informed were deeply cynical and largely detached from politics.
And then this storm of passion. I can explain on paper what happened — how devolution created this mess — but I do not really understand.
I know. But it’s the positive tone from Breitbart, Sean Hannity, etc. — people who know better — that gets to me.
I wouldn’t paint it so broadly on the American side, at least not yet. First, in both parties we’re only talking about 30% of the vote, not a majority — that seems to be Trump’s ceiling. Second, in both parties the protest candidate is surging in light of very real concerns about the electability of the presumed frontrunner. In the Republican context, with 15 other candidates, Trump seems precisely the wrong answer; but there is also a unique name recognition factor that is hard to evaluate.
On the Democratic side, if you’re nervous about Hillary your options are severely limited. If it ever makes sense to cast a protest vote for an all-out socialist it does now.
And third, actual voting is still far away, and one can dream without worrying about electability.
So the sentiment is perhaps the same as that behind the Corbyn surge — but it affects a far smaller portion of the electorate, so far, and the “electability” factor may yet come back into play.
And back when America had a government that hadn’t metastasized the way ours has, that was a viable option.
But as the old joke goes, you may not be interested in the government, but the government is interested in you.
As opposed to all the “serious” candidates the Democrats are putting forward?
In her own way, Hillary is about as big a joke as The Donald. And after that, there’s Bernie Sanders. And after that there’s… um, wait a minute, hmm, lesseee…
For what it’s worth, I think the GOP is best thought of as a political party, but not an especially conservative party.
The GOP does exhibit celebrations of traditional America, which conservatives appreciate. And the GOP is the party to which the right of center has traditionally rallied.
But I believe that the GOP doesn’t have a conservative bone in its corporatist body that wasn’t put there by the conservatives. And kept reinserting every time said bone was rejected like a failed kidney transplant.
I think of the GOP as a criminal organization, sort of like the Dixie mafia. A loose group of criminals and con men that specializes in conning conservatives by promising stuff they can’t deliver for money. If this activity was done by anything other than a political party it would be considered illegal.
Nah, the GOP is like a group of stamp collectors who huddle in a secret room mocking the people who don’t get the sophistication of stamp collecting.
Casey,
How did you know?
Hey, wait a minute. She really does look just like Claire…oh come on..it couldn’t be.
Wait till this hits my unconscious. Yikes!
Regards,
Jim
Stamp collectors do not extort money through taxation and distribute it to cronies. I can handle stamp collectors because their huddling in secret rooms mocking me does not change my life one way or the other. Can’t say that about the legal criminal enterprises known as political parties. What they do directly hits everybody’s pocket book, maybe even put people in jail.