The main parts of the Gallup/USA Today/CNN poll have already been discussed but I had some off-to-the-side responses to it that I'd post here.
1) According to the Gallup breakdown, about 15% of the respondents said that Baby was "too liberal." Now, I'm not surprised that SOME people find Bush too liberal. There is always a fringe. Some John Birchers thought Eisenhower was, literally, a Communist, after all. That said, 15% strikes me as amazingly high, given the last couple of years. This isn't a few diehards sending around mimeographed cartoons of the Pope and Stalin; this is a large number of people. And those are the very people that Ragin' Roy Moore could speak to. Run, Roy, Run. Would he get them all? Of course not. But he could get a few.
- By contrast only 9% said Kerry was "too conservative," which is also interesting. Kerry is the one getting the challenge from the left, after all, in Nader form. Nader's numbers here are interesting. He's pulling 4% of likely voters, 5% of registered voters, and 7% of all adults. Which means that my Nader Nodder thesis may not be entirely wrong. Some of the Nader backers are in fact the kinds of people who like to wash gruesome and bloody car crashes on TV; that doesn't mean they'll drive their car to the election booth. The good news is that the Nader vote doesn't really make a difference. Bush is ahead of Kerry by 2-5 points in this poll whether you include Nader or not, no matter which group of potential voters you survey. In the end Nader may get some votes but not make a difference at all. If there is any kind of coordination between Nader and Kerry (and it's not impossible that this could emerge from their planned meeting) Nader could in fact target his campaign to pick up votes in places where Kerry either doesn't have a chance or has a commanding lead. Of course, that wasn't what Nader did last time, but I'm keeping a little hope alive.
- I know that some here disagree (and I'm eager to hear you tell me why I'm wrong) but the USA Today version of the poll illustrates why Kerry should consider John McCain. First, a growing number of people think Kerry is "too liberal." Much more effectively than any Democrat, McCain's choice would defuse that charge. He would be walking talking proof that Kerry is not "too liberal." Second, McCain is a wildly popular politician. McCain's favorable/unfavorable split is 53/21 in this poll; that's actually the worst he's done recently. Kerry is at 53/36, Bush at 57/41. The real number to watch is the unfavorable number--it's easy to boost your popularity, but once people have an unfavorable opinion of you, it's hell to bring them back. Almost nobody has a strongly unfavorable opinion of McCain. He reinforces Kerry's basic message--you can trust me because I'm tough, you can support me because I'm reasonable--and he would be a very effective voice at saying, "John Kerry is no liberal." Now, how conservative is McCain? Is too far out of bounds to be considered? I don't think so. In the 107th Congress, according to Dr. Keith Poole's great studies, McCain was the 43rd most conservative senator/57th most liberal. That put him between Gordon Smith and Susan Collins, and just behind Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter, Jefford, the Zell-Out, and Chafee. That, combined with McCain's aggressive hinting to reporters in 2000 that he would take a pro-choice stance in the general election, is enough to make it worth considering. If McCain didn't bring so many positives, or if the campaign wasn't so close and so vital, I might feel differently. But as it is...
(In fairness, I should say that McCain comes up as much more conservative on the 108th Congress vote study; I don't know enough to say why. But in the 2000-2002 sessions, McCain ranked as the 55th most conservative senators out of 126 who serve during those sessions (spread over two different congresses, so there was some turnover) which put him alongside Gordon Smith, William Roth, and the Collins/Snowe Maine Brigade.)
4) It is interesting, though not surprising to see that what people think about Richard Clarke's testimony is heavily determined by what they already thought. According to the USA Today report on the poll (I can't find this in the raw data), 44% of the people surveyed believe Clarke and 46% the Bush Administration (suckers!) But 76% of Democrats believe Clarke while 83% of Republicans do not. I take a few things from this.
First, the gap between those numbers--76% of Democrats vs. 83% of Republicans--might be the sum total of the Rush effect. I kind of believe that the right-wing media can build up slightly increased levels of belief among people who are already inclined to believe them. But I don't think this has a huge impact, and if the Air America liberal radio programs (launching today!) take off at all, that gap would narrow. Which is great. But I don't think talk radio has killed the Democrats--Clinton won twice after all during the El Rushbo years--and I don't think talk radio will save them either. That said, I'd rather have it than not, and I wish they had a station in Philly or in any market in a swing state. Right now it's covering California, New York, and Illinois, three states the Democrats will win unless Kerry gets caught with a live boy or a dead girl, in Edwin Edwards' memorable phrase.
Of course, my take on this gap could be a total mistake. I'm willing to believe the 7% difference in Dem v. Republican consistency is random, or based on other factors.
Second, I am struck by the way personal filters overdetermine our interpretation of media coverage. I don't exactly believe that all the Republicans are watching Fox News and all the Democrats are listening to NPR. In fact, we all know that ABC, CBS, and NBC are far, far more popular than any of the cable or radio competitors. So people are, on the whole, watching the same shows and interpreting them in entirely different ways, based upon their own preconceptions. This makes sense to me, and it's part of the reason the Fox stuff doesn't get me that excited--people who watch Fox have either 1) decided to vote Republican or 2) just turned to get some excitement.
I am not a political scientist, thank God, but I have struggled through a few texts on popular beliefs and political behavior. The most famous model that I know of is John Zaller's Receive/Accept/Sample model. Zaller's model still suggests that the only real role people have in setting their own opinions on politics is through testing the received elite opinion against experience, although Zaller is in fairness actually modifying even more elite-driven models that dominated the field in the 1960s and 1970s. Taeku Lee, in a very interesting study of civil rights and popular opinion called Mobilizing Public Opinion, argues that "latent" ideas can be deeply held, derived from personal reflection, and maintained despite a lack of elite reinforcement. These "latent" beliefs, once widely spread can lead to effects that no group of elites caused or anticipated. In fact, Lee argues that this is just what happened with white northern public opinion during the civil rights era. Rather than responding dumbly to images of broadcast civil rights outrages, growing numbers of northerners were independently developing ideas about race that essentially created those images (or at least the demand for them.) Rather than being a mere audience, the mass of northern people were essentially creators of a new set of public images and public languages. Lee's model suggests that there are limits to the spread of latent beliefs--limits in his study based upon race and region--so they are less effective in the long run than widely broadcast elite beliefs but still can play key roles in shaping public opinion.
At least, I think I've summarized this well enough. I am not a political scientist. If you are, tell me what I got wrong.
Anyway, I suspect that in a strange way the fact that Democrats and Republicans reach opposite conclusions from the same newscasts reinforces this idea. People create; they don't just respond. That's a little reason for hope. Of course--since half the people are creating what seems to me to be a bundle of fibs and delusions--it's also a reason for despair.
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