Brendan Nyhan

Zogby International, the polling firm of John Zogby, announced its latest poll yesterday with a press release headlined “No Bounce.” The release states that “President Bush’s televised address to the nation produced no noticeable bounce in his approval numbers, with his job approval rating slipping a point from a week ago, to 43%, in the latest Zogby International poll.”

But if you read the details of the poll, you will find out that it was conducted from June 27-29. Bush gave his speech during the evening of June 28. So how could Zogby tell if Bush got a bounce when a substantial portion of his respondents were interviewed before the speech? This seems like another example of Zogby’s questionable professional ethics to me.

Yet despite this obvious flaw, the poll was touted by Bloomberg as showing that Bush did not receive a bounce:

Bush’s Iraq Speech Fails to Rally Support, Poll Finds

U.S. President George W. Bush’s public
approval rating remained in negative territory after a nationally
televised address on Iraq, a new poll has found.

The poll by Utica, New York-based Zogby International
reported that 43 percent of those surveyed approved of Bush’s job
performance and 56 percent disapproved. The poll of 905 people was
taken June 27-29 and had a margin of error of 3.3 percentage
points.

What’s especially strange is that reporter Ken Fireman notes later in the article that Bush’s speech took place on June 28, but doesn’t see fit to mention the contradiction between that date and the period in which the poll was conducted. (Atrios also picked up the release and quoted it without comment.)

As I wrote before, Bush is ultimately unlikely to get any significant boost from the speech. But to demonstrate that, we need a poll conducted after the speech. This is not complicated. So why can’t Zogby and Bloomberg get it right?

Clarification 7/2: As a commenter correctly points out, I somehow missed this statement in the press release:

The Zogby America survey includes calls made both before and after the President’s address, and the results show no discernible “bump” in his job approval, with voter approval of his job performance at 45% in the final day of polling.

Apologies for the error. But it doesn’t change my conclusion. The press release initially touts the overall finding of an approval level of 43% as evidence of a lack of a bounce. That’s just wrong. And the fact that the approval level in the third day is close to his previous one isn’t proof of anything. Assuming a proportional number of calls across the three days, Zogby made about 300 calls in the third day. As such, his margin of error for polling on that day is much larger than the +/- 3.3% margin of error for the survey as a whole, which means that he can’t conclude much of anything from the 45% figure.

Update 7/2: A Gallup poll conducted after Bush’s speech (6/29-6/30) shows Bush’s job approval at 46%, which is not statistically distinct from the previous level of 45% (6/24-6/26). It also shows that responses to questions about Iraq appear to be relatively stable, though pro-war sentiment bumped up 4% on two questions, which is right at the limit of the poll’s margin of error.

Via Wonkette, this passage from a Nation web-only piece on the national convention of the College Republicans is almost too easy to mock, though it is amusing:

By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. “The people opposed to the war aren’t putting their asses on the line,” Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn’t he putting his ass on the line? “I’m not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country,” he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, “and I wasn’t going to pass that up.”

But the rest of the article is far more disturbing. Behold the ugly legacy of Dinesh D’Souza et al:

[Chairman candidate Mike] Davidson became the stuff of legend for his activity in the liberal hotbed of Berkeley. As secretary of the California College Republicans, he built dozens of chapters in schools throughout California, helped deliver a record turnout for Bush in the state and organized a now-famous “pro-America” rally in People’s Park. His candidacy has been endorsed by Representative David Dreier and Ann Coulter, who hailed him as a pioneer of “the new McCarthyism.” And with good reason. Last February, in a [David] Horowitz-inspired redbaiting operation, College Republicans at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California posted fliers on the doors of ten professors’ offices bearing a red star and a warning quoting a 1950s-era state education code forbidding “the advocacy and teaching of communism.” One professor’s crime was displaying a poster for the film Fahrenheit 9/11 in his office window. Soon after, a press release appeared on the California College Republicans’ website identifying the stunt as “Operation Red Scare.”

Yes, in the modern Republican Party, when someone says you’re practicing “the new McCarthyism,” they’re endorsing you!

In the end, Davidson lost to a candidate who was accused of raising funds for the College Republicans under misleading pretenses from seniors with dementia. Classy stuff.

(PS TNR Online has a less colorful piece on the convention here.)

Interestingly enough, the press is finally picking up on the way President Bush linked Iraq and 9/11 over and over during his speech last night. He’s only been doing it for, what, almost three years? We wrote all about it in All the President’s Spin. So have many other people. But the press frequently refuses to point it out since he tends to suggest a link between Iraq and 9/11 without stating the claim directly.

As recently as two weeks ago, in fact, Bush clearly linked Iraq to 9/11 during his radio address on June 18 (via Atrios):

We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens. Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world’s terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror.

Yet a Google News search shows no critical news reporting on his statement.

Today, however, a number of outlets covered his claims skeptically, including the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times and CNN. Why? Two obvious reasons: His approval ratings are low, and Democrats criticized Bush for using 9/11, which gives the press a news hook to justify reporting on the issue. Both were missing in the runup to the war in Iraq, which is why the administration got away with so much. Does this mean that the press is finally going to reassert itself? We’ll see.

Did you think Ed Klein’s book-length smear of Hillary Clinton represented a new low for the publishing industry? Think again.

Racist OJ cop Mark Fuhrman is about to release a new book on Terri Schiavo. Here’s what the Human Events promotional material says: “Fuhrman proves that the death of Terri Schiavo was a legal homicide perpetrated by the State of Florida at the behest of Michael Schiavo.”

In addition, Fuhrman’s book, like Klein’s, wasn’t published by Regnery or some other conservative press. It was published by William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins, and it’s ranked #38 on Amazon. Weep for our democracy.

I just got one of those fundraising solicitations disguised as a “survey” from the Democratic National Committee, and it’s a perfect illustration of why the party is such a disaster.

First, unlike the Heritage Foundation “survey” I debunked on Spinsanity a couple of years ago, this one actually doesn’t have a bunch of ridiculously tilted and misleading survey questions. If anything, many of the answers cut against positions that Democrats advocate now or might advocate in the future, or exclude options that people in the party advocate. Some examples:

2. Which of the following statements most closely matches your view when it comes to extending the life of Social Security?
-Privatize the program to allow workers to invest some of their Social Security payroll contributions in the stock market.
-Cut benefits or raise the retirement age to extend the life of Social Security.
-Use means testing to reduce benefits for wealthy or high income retirees.
-No changes in Social Security are necessary.

Strangely, the preferred solvency-improving option of many party members — raising the cap on income that’s subject to payroll taxes — is missing. Also, the “means testing” language is outdated, since it sounds like the President’s “progressive indexing” proposal, but as many Democrats have correctly pointed out, Bush’s plan would actually substantially reduce benefits for the middle class, not just the “wealthy or high income retirees.”

4. Should the government put a high priority on stopping American manufacturing jobs from being “outsourced” to overseas workers?
-Yes, the manufacturing jobs being lost are essential to our economy.
-No, American consumers benefit from cheaper goods made overseas.

This question is only going to popularize the fiction that outsourcing can be “stopped,” and in doing so will further box in the next Democratic president on trade policy. Given that John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and others were already shamelessly pandering on this issue, it’s a bad sign.

7. In your view, what is the best way to ensure health care coverage for all Americans?
-Tax credits to help employers provide health care coverage for their employees.
-Medical savings accounts that let families set aside money for health care costs.
-A government-run system where everyone is guaranteed coverage.

“A government-run system”? That’s really going to sell the base on universal health care. I’m personally a believer that single-payer is a non-starter for the foreseeable future, and that something like the “Universal Healthcare Voucher” is the only hope we have. But if even the Democrats call universal coverage “a government-run system” we might as well give up now.

11. What is your opinion about a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion?
-I support a woman’s right to choose.
-I support a woman’s right to choose, but believe we need some restrictions such as parental notification laws and mandatory waiting periods before having an abortion.
-I oppose a woman’s right to choose.

It’s strange to include a question that splits your base right down the middle (since many Democrats support restrictions on the right to abortion). Given that the answers to this “survey” aren’t representative of anything, what do they hope to accomplish? The question reminds a substantial number of Democrats that they disagree with most elected members of their party on a highly emotional issue. Is this part of Howard Dean’s new effort to moderate the party’s position on abortion?

Finally, here’s the capper that sums it all up — the URL given on the survey (www.democrats.org/survey) doesn’t work. Of course.

Via Dan Froomkin, here’s Newsweek questioning the efficacy of high-profile presidential speeches:

[T]he administration is not politically deaf. Bush and his advisers can hear the rumblings of concern in the public and within their party’s own ranks, and last week they began taking steps to shore up support for the war. In the view of the White House, the public is periodically upset by the violent images on its TVs and so the president must, from time to time, speak up. The model for the president’s speech this week was his address to the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., last year. . . .

[B]ut it’s not clear that Bush’s speeches serve to inspire. According to the Gallup poll, support for the war in Iraq went up 1 percentage point after his War College speech last year. Public confidence seems to more closely track the ebbs and flows in violence.

First, a 1 percentage point change is within the margin of error of the poll — it’s literally meaningless. But the larger point that Newsweek is driving at is clear. In the aggregate, presidential approval responds to fundamentals — the economy, the number of war deaths, prospects for victory, etc. Prime time speeches just don’t work. As George Edwards suggests in his book On Deaf Ears, presidential initiatives to change public opinion rarely succeed. What’s ironic is that every president has to re-learn this lesson. Bush’s particular lesson has been delayed for years by the popularity boost he received from 9/11, but he will soon realize that his top second-term domestic and foreign policy initiatives — Social Security and Iraq — are essentially immune to his efforts to whip up support.

In short, the perception that public opinion fluctuates wildly in response to elite messages is wrong, at least when elites are divided. Macro public opinion is actually quite stable, and it moves in understandable long-term patterns. So go democracy! In the aggregate, the public doesn’t listen to spin; they respond to fundamentals.

(For more on the specifics of public opinion toward war, see Choosing Your Battles by my colleagues at Duke, Peter Feaver and Chris Gelpi. The bottom line of their research is that the public is willing to tolerate a relatively high number of casualties if they think victory is likely and the cause is important. And for more on macro public opinion, see Page and Shapiro’s The Rational Public and especially Erickson, MacKuen, and Stimson’s classic The Macro Polity.)

Via Salon’s War Room blog, here’s NBC’s First Read on how Sen. Elizabeth Dole has joined the GOP’s latest anti-dissent offensive

Six days after [Karl Rove] accused liberals — especially MoveOn.org — of being weak in responding to 9/11, MoveOn today launches a $500,000 TV and print advertising campaign calling to bring home US soldiers from Iraq. (“We got in the wrong way,” the ad states. “Let’s get out the right way.”) As if on cue, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) sent out a statement yesterday calling the ad “an utter disgrace.” “To politicize the War in Iraq at this critical juncture,” she said, “emboldens the enemy and does so at the peril of our men and women in uniform. I hope my colleagues from both sides of the aisle will join me in disavowing this poisonous ad.”

Once again, a prominent Republican has deployed all the usual code words — “embolden” the enemy, endangering the troops. How can we spread democracy abroad when one party is trying to suppress it at home?

Despite frequent claims to the contrary, John McCain is unlikely to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 for one simple reason: the conservative establishment, which controls the Republican Party, hates him. It’s the same reason he lost in 2000.

Here’s a leading indicator — anti-McCain vitriol from top apparatchik Grover Norquist:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) became a target in the latest round of political rhetoric when Republican strategist Grover Norquist referred to him last week as “the nut-job from Arizona…

Norquist said he “misspoke” and added, “I meant to say gun-grabbing, tax-increasing Bolshevik.”

(For more on how the party establishments have re-established control over the primary process, see this 2004 paper by Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller [PDF].)

James Taranto claims (without evidence, of course) that “some” in the left and the press want America to be defeated in Iraq:

That Iraq is “another Vietnam” was a cliche long before the
U.S.-led coalition even liberated Baghdad, but lately the drumbeat has become
louder and more tired than ever. A Google
News search for “Iraq” and “Vietnam” turns up more than
6,500 articles in the past month…

Is Iraq really similar to Vietnam? Only in the sense that some in politics
and the media would like to see America lose.

This is the latest in a long pattern of suggestions that critics of the war in Iraq hate America or want to undermine the US war effort. And, though I don’t like facile Vietnam analogies, how can Taranto possibly think that there are no similarities between the two wars?

Tim Rutten calls for the major media to just stop talking about Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary:

The way to handle “The Truth About Hillary” responsibly is to give it no further notice, no wider discussion.

Silence.

If the serious media can’t draw the line on this one, then there no longer are any lines to draw.

Of course, the paradox is that even making this argument requires giving the book more attention than it deserves. (That’s why I haven’t devoted more space to various debunkings of its factual inaccuracies by Rutten, Michael Tomasky, Chris Suellentrop, John F. Harris, and especially Media Matters, among others.) But Rutten is right. And given the growing list of conservatives disavowing the book, which now includes Bill O’Reilly, John Podhoretz, Peggy Noonan, and Joe Scarborough, we may yet succeed in drawing the line.