"Ordinary" Matters, At Least in Poll Wording

Two polls this week on the NSA mess offer a nice case study of the power of a single word in survey research.

I offer to you, dear reader, that simplest of words -- ordinary.

An ordinary word, ordinary.  It means "commonly encountered," according to this dictionary.  Or, more to the point in describing me: "Of no exceptional ability, degree, or quality; average."  Yup, that about sums me up.  Ask anyone.

But here ordinary carries extraordinary meaning.  A recent CBS news poll asked:

In order to reduce the threat of terrorism, do you approve or disapprove of federal government agencies collecting phone records of ordinary Americans?

Thirty-eight percent approved of collecting phone records, while 58 percent disapproved. I underlined ordinary because, in this instance, it's anything but.  A Pew poll conducted at about the same time asked a similar question:

As you may know, it has been reported that the National Security Agency has been getting secret court orders to track telephone call records of millions of Americans in an effort to investigate terrorism. Would you consider this access to telephone call records an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?

See that millions?  Sure you do, because I cleverly emphasized it using all the typographical tools at my disposal.  The results are different.  Fifty-six percent find this acceptable in the Pew poll, significantly higher than the ordinary CBS wording.  That's a helluva difference.  Yes, the questions differ in other ways, but I'm certain the use of ordinary versus millions makes all the difference in the world.

So, which is the more accurate question?  Glad you asked.  In this case, I find ordinary to be an extraordinarily loaded word, to make it sound like it's something closer to home.  I like the millions language better.  More abstract, less threatening.  Less loaded.

 

Are "Independents" Just Dumb?

In survey research, we worry a lot about no-opinion opinions.  That is, respondents who give an opinion without really having one, which is related (but distinct from) uninformed opinion.  And in that theme, there's this CBS News story that wonders who the heck are these "independents" that everyone is so worried about.

Why do we care about independents?  A CBS column by history professor Michael Kazin notes:

No group in American politics gets more respect than independent voters. Pundits and reporters probe what these allegedly moderate citizens think about this issue and that candidate, major party strategists seek the golden mean of messaging that will attract independents to their camp and/or alienate them from the opposing one. Presidential nominees and aides struggle to come up with phrases and settings that will soothe or excite them. But what if millions of independents are really just a confused and clueless horde, whose interest in politics veers between the episodic and the non-existent?

Elections, especially presidential elections, often settle on the swing voters, the self-styled "independents" who can be nudged, moved, shifted, or shoved toward one candidate or away from another.  Kazin notes that these "independents" tend to be accepting of a mishmash of political positions from the left and the right, from the Dems or from the GOPers.  As he puts it: "To a sympathetic eye, this result might connote a pleasant openness to contrasting opinions, perhaps a desire to give each group of partisans the benefit of the doubt. But I think it demonstrates a basic thoughtlessness."

This is nothing new.  Philip Converse wrote about this in 1964 in his seminal piece, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics."  Without getting too PhDweebish, Converse pointed out the inconsistencies in our ideological belief systems.  Later, folks dived into this and established, long ago, that a huge chunk of the American electorate (the "independents") held highly inconsistent beliefs.  Kazin reminds us of the infamous Lippmann/Dewey debates from the 1920s about whether the public was capable of understanding politics. 

It's an excellent piece.

National Priorities

What do people name as the top national priority? You're thinking, "Aha! Trick question! It's so obvious!"

No trick. Just like you guessed, it's the economy. A CBS News/NYTimes poll had 60 percent of adults nationwide saying the economy is, to borrow from CNN, job #1.

In second place? Other.

I don't know what the hell other is, given the long list of topics scoring from 2 or 3 percent. In that list you've got stuff like war in Iraq, family values, education, health care, poverty, and the ever-popular "unsure." Given the margin of error, there is a huge tie for second among nine different topics.

Other recent surveys show largely the same thing -- economy first, a host of other issues tied at a distant second. What people know out there is that things are bad, getting worse, and there's not an overload of confidence in government's ability -- Democratic or Republican -- to fix the mess. Sometimes political knowledge comes down to direct experience, and I'm betting average people out there have a hell of a lot more direct experience with job loss and tough economic times than do the suits in D.C. of either party.