Tuesday, March 25, 2014

How Polls Work - And How Pew Got The Answer They Wanted On ObamaCare

 http://2-ps.googleusercontent.com/h/www.powerlineblog.com/admin/ed-assets/2013/10/580x561xLuke-Obamacare-copy-600x581.jpg.pagespeed.ic.Zz2sBVPDK3.jpg

The Pew Trust recently came out with a poll that the Obama media eagerly seized on - that the majority of Americans want congress to tweak the law to make it work rather than repealing it.

Ace reveals how Pew managed this nice little piece of propaganda:

Well, imagine how you, personally, would inquire into the preferred course of action of Obamacare supporters. You might give them the options of "Work to improve it anyway," or "Stay out of the way of it/Let it collapse under its own weight," and so forth.

Here are the options -- two of them -- that Pew gave respondents to choose from:

What do you think elected officials who oppose the health care law should do now that the law has started to take effect? Should they [X] or should they [Y]?


Do what they can to make the law work as well as possible

Do what they can to make the law fail

Emphasis added.


In other words, people weren't given a 'repeal' option. Their choices were limited to tweaking this failed bit of socialist mayhem or sabotaging it.

Most people would still choose a less aggressive, underhanded-sounding response, like "Let it collapse under its own weight."

But Pew refuses respondents that choice, insisting that people either declare their desire to "make Obamacare work the best we can, by Golly!" or declare themselves hostage-taking terrorists of the sort often decried by one Harry Reid.

Why, you'd almost think that major institutions of the media are entirely captured by the political left or something.


It would be even more interesting to see whether Pew used another common tactic - vastly oversampling Democrats, or picking respondents from largely Democrat dominated urban areas.

Since Pew is self-funded, their polls normally are fairly legitimate,but obviously someone got to somebody here - almost certainly in response to a direct request from the White House.

Welcome to the world of 'polling'.

2 comments:

louielouie said...

Most people would still choose a less aggressive, underhanded-sounding response,

i'm curious.
would a response, such as, "shove it up john robert's ss", be considered too aggressive?
just curious.

B.Poster said...

Actually what Americans really want is a single payer health care system similar to what they have in places like Canada, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Everyone knows their system is far better than what he had here before ACA was passed. Since ACA has failed to make things better and has likely made them worse, people are likely more solidified behind the single payer option than they were.

If team Obama really want single payer health care, they could have gone straight to it without the intermediate step of ACA. If the support was not available among Republicans, simply get all Democrats behind it and pick off he Republican support needed to pass it. This is clean and simple and its worked for Democrats for many years. America is a left of center nation politically. The American people would have gotten behind this. They still probably would.

When I say everyone "knows" the single payer health care systems mentioned above are better than what the US had or has, this does not mean they actually are better. It's just Americans have been told this for so long by the education system and the media that it would be hard to find many folks who don't believe this.