Pollsters use leading questions to manipulate the uninformed

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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While critics have admonished pollsters and the press for disseminating inaccurate portrayals of public opinion on important national issues, they have generally ignored perhaps the most serious and intractable problem in this endeavour — a poorly informed American public.

Polling ill-informed Americans

Poll after poll has shown that on complex issues like health care reform and raising the debt ceiling, many Americans freely admit that they have insufficient understanding of the issues. Estimates of the number of ill-informed range from about 40 per cent to over 70 per cent of the population.

Their opinions, because they are unformed, are easily manipulated. Whatever views they do hold are ephemeral and subject to change with new information. The evidence suggests the magnitude of this problem readily dwarfs statistical uncertainties of polls as characterized by confidence intervals (e.g., this percentage is accurate to ± 2.5 per cent 19 times out of 20).

And yet pollsters persist in asking their opinions regardless.

Why are pollsters so persistent? Why don’t they simply classify these respondents as having ‘no opinion’?

Pollsters need answers

Because when pollsters are commissioned to poll public opinion (often by press organizations), they need to deliver the goods. Reporting that half the public has no idea about the particulars of health care reform or the debt ceiling is not the headline the press has paid for.

This leaves pollsters with a dilemma. How do they get respondents to proffer an opinion on some topic when they really haven’t thought much about it?

Use of leading questions

They do what good litigators do. They ask leading questions where the answer to the question is embedded in the wording of the question.

How do they manage that?

The leading or suggestive wording comes from an intensive and broad-based media coverage of the political debate in Washington on the topic in question. Media reports, especially on TV, still carry a good deal of cachet among Americans, and the political messages they carry from the partisan debate in Congress tend to find their mark among the public.

The media bombardment conditions the ill-informed Americans to associate ideological tautologies that flow out of the partisan debate.

So for example, a Republican-leaning respondent associates “raising the debt ceiling” with “oppose”, and “increased debt” and “spending cuts” if the legislation is to pass. A Democratic-leaning respondent associates “raising the debt ceiling” with “support”, and “government default” and “financial chaos” if it does not happen. For respondents who know next to nothing on this complex topic, that’s all they need to know to answer the poll questions.

Leading questions mislead

But clearly these simplistic associations trivialize the complexity of the issue. The impact of spending cuts would increase what is an already high unemployment rate. Most Americans, be they Democrats or Republicans, regard the high unemployment as far more serious and immediate than debt reduction. How would that influence their support or opposition to raising the debt ceiling?

Yet another complication stems from the historical perspective. There have been many previous debt ceiling increases, including seven during the previous Bush presidency. These were never linked to legislated spending cuts. So why now?

For respondents who know little about the subject matter, finding out about the economic impact or historical pattern of debt ceiling legislation could have significantly influenced them in favor of raising the ceiling.

Explanatory preambles

It’s really important that when polling a complex national issue, pollsters include questions with a preamble explaining some aspect of the complexity, and then ask respondents whether they favor or oppose the issue being polled. These preambles can significantly alter the level of public support for a complex issue that for many is opaque.

During the health care debate some polls found that using this type of preamble question increased public support for Mr. Obama’s healthcare reforms. According to a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, without a preamble explaining the reforms, only 36 per cent of Americans felt Mr. Obama’s plan was a good idea. With a preamble, 56 per cent said they were in favor of it.

In spite of these merits, these questions are not popular with pollsters because the extra verbiage makes them more demanding for respondents and can impact on survey response rates. Also, pollsters have to be careful in the wording of the preamble so as not to bias the response to favor or oppose the issue being polled.

Open-ended questions

Another strategy to consider when polling complex issues is to simply abdicate the traditional structure of leading questions and pre-formatted responses, and rely on open-ended questions that do not use leading phraseology to prompt answers. In effect, let respondents answer in their own words. This approach was taken by Gallup in one of their surveys. It yielded results that differed markedly from polls using preformatted responses.

For example, on the provision in the health care reform legislation requiring that all Americans who did not have health insurance to get it, a CNN poll using pre-formatted responses showed that 53 per cent of the public were opposed to it. Without prompting, the Gallup survey revealed that only 5 per cent were opposed to this provision.

Pollsters and the press do not favor these open questions for a number of reasons. One has to do with the logistics of converting polling data into news stories. Each response has to be manually categorized and coded. For today’s instantaneous news cycle this process is simply too slow and cumbersome.

Secondly, the coding scheme is subject to some degree of uncertainty due to coding decisions made by humans. However, these errors can be kept to a minimum through independent coding verification.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, it robs the press of its headlines. Without recourse to the prompting effect of pre-formatted responses, the open-ended responses tend to be scattered across a number of distinct categories, making it difficult to summarize them in a simple, catchy headline.

Focusing on informed respondents

Yet another approach might be to simply compare poll findings for those who admit they are ill-informed with those who claim they are sufficiently informed. The problem is that regardless of whether there are differences or similarities between the two groups, these results may be inconclusive due to the influence of other variables and factors. A more complex statistical analysis would need to be undertaken. There is also the problem of respondents’ self-assessment of being informed or not. One person’s assessment of being well-informed could be another’s of being ill-informed.

A more relevant and accurate comparison might be one based on behaviour — whether a respondent votes in elections. Comparisons between voters and nonvoters can test the hypothesis that those who vote have a greater familiarity with important national issues. Comparisons can also reveal if support for an issue is substantially different between voters and nonvoters. The rationale behind this approach is similar to that of polls predicting election results by trying to identify those most likely to vote on election day.

To put it another way, if a segment of the population has such a low sense of civic responsibility that they don’t vote, does it really matter what their opinion is on some complex national issue? Ultimately the political establishment will be judged on their performance by those who vote, not those who don’t. That said, it makes sense that the press should focus on public opinion that is politically meaningful, rather than confound it with possibly very different opinion of those who don’t vote and politically are not players.

Sacrificing accuracy for excitement and bottom line

All these strategies place a greater responsibility on the press and pollsters to do a much better job of identifying legitimate public opinion, particularly when a substantial segment of the population professes ignorance of a complex national issue. Rather than cherry pick questions that create an exciting narrative and coincidently helps sell papers, the press needs to make sure it has its public opinion facts right. The latter should also be the focus for pollsters. Instead their focus is on technological innovations like robo calling and flash internet surveys from respondent pools, the primary purpose of which seems to be to improve their bottom line.

The current state of affairs in polling public opinion in America is a disservice to the country. Ill-informed Americans are being influenced by self serving media stories and simplistic, suggestive polling questions to profer answers that do not reflect their true opinion on the issues. The proliferation of inaccurate public opinion is destructive to national dialogue. Ultimately, it isolates Americans from each other, advancing social division over common purpose.

This article was originally published by iPolitics on October 26, 2011.

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Searching for Accuracy in Election Predictions: More Regulation of Polls or More Competition?

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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Lately, contradictory election polls seem to be as common as contradictory political messages during election campaigns.

Contradictory polls

The recent provincial election in Ontario is a good example.  During the campaign poll results were all over the map .  In one instance, an Abacus Data poll published by Sun Media on Tuesday, September 15 showed the Progressive Conservatives 9% ahead of the Liberals, while a few days earlier, on Friday, September 9, a Harris/Decima poll published by the Globe and Mail showed the Liberals 11% ahead of the Progressive Conservatives.  These massive differences cannot be explained by sampling error.

While the public expects contradictory political messages, contradictory polls are unsettling.  Aren’t polls supposed to be a scientifically accurate measurement of the popularity of candidates?  With their ubiquitous reference to the 95% confidence interval, accuracy is a polling virtue the industry assiduously fosters.

So if polls conflict, the public naturally wonders which ones are right and which ones are wrong.

Or are any of the polls correct?

In polling the 2011 Canadian Federal election, no poll predicted a majority Conservative government.

These conflicts tend to undermine the trust that the public has in prediction polls, and, by association, any media accounts referencing such polls.

Concerned about the damage this may cause to the election process and the credibility of the political debate, some have called for the regulation of the polling industry to ensure greater accuracy and consistency among polls.

Regulating polls to improve accuracy

Regulating polls would require some sort of agreement on standards for the different methodologies used by pollsters.  Unfortunately all of the commonly used methodologies have substantial deficits that impact their accuracy.

  • Household telephone polls miss many respondents who have cell phones but no household telephone.  The latter group is estimated to be between 20 and 25% of the public and is growing.  Household telephone polls need to and occasionally are supplemented by a representative subsample of cell phone only users.  For the longest time this methodology has been the gold standard for election polls.
  • Robo polls have a high rate of nonresponse because, well… people don’t like talking to robots.  It raises the question of who do the respondents represent.  Playing loosely with the laws of probability produces polls based on what more correctly should be called quota samples rather than probability samples.  In the absence of a probability sample, concepts like sampling error used to ascertain accuracy become relatively meaningless.  The undisputed virtue of this methodology is its low cost.
  • Internet polls are based on massive respondent pools that are supposed to represent the entire voter population.  The problem is that many in a pool are not randomly selected but volunteer simply to make a buck (self-selection).  This undermines the representivity of the pool in relation to the population.  Representivity of Internet polls is also limited by a lack of Internet accessibility for approximately one third of the population.  The undisputed virtue of this methodology is its quick turnaround.  Results can be produced overnight.

Weighting results for better accuracy

However, the irony here is that even if a methodology, due to its flaws, badly misrepresents the target population of voters, pollsters can still achieve very accurate predictions by weighting the raw data.

The weighting algorithm is generally regarded by pollsters as a trade secret.  Based on years of experience that have provided pollsters with empirical evidence on how to best allocate the undecideds among the competing candidates, and how to create an index that calculates the numerical probability that a respondent will actually vote on election day, the weighting algorithm can literally turn polling dross into polling gold.

The actual algorithm can be quite complex.  Since nearly half of all eligible voters don’t vote on election day, pollsters in essence have to figure out which half of the sample is the half that does.

In the recent provincial election in Ontario, the pretenders to the throne i.e., polls with relatively untested methodologies, managed to get numbers closer to election day results than polls using the household telephone methodology.

This so aggravated some pollsters employing the more traditional and expensive household telephone methodology that they have publicly challenged the rest of the industry about using second-rate methodologies.  While there is merit in their criticisms, the rest of the industry has basically shrugged it off as sour grapes.

It may well be that the prediction poll is a very specialized instrument, like a racing thoroughbred, that is good for one thing and one thing only.  The new methodologies and statistical tricks used to make election predictions may make the measurement of other opinions less accurate.  Presently there is insufficient comparative research between these methodologies from which to draw any conclusions.

However, so long as the public’s primary interest in election polls is discovering who’s winning the race, methodological concerns will be given short shrift.  In the prediction business, the ends justify the means.

Scientific versus subjective nature of polling

The truth is, all this hue and cry is simply a consequence of the fact that an election poll is an exercise affected as much by the art of polling as by the science.  The weighting algorithm includes subjective choices on the part of pollsters as to which variables will be instrumental in influencing voting decisions.  The art and the science combine to produce the algorithm.  The algorithm can be thought of as a black box that converts raw polling numbers to published predictions.  It is these black boxes that ultimately separate pollsters into winners and losers.

It follows that if accuracy is as much a function of subjective decisions as the application of scientific statistical principles, then deciding on a set of methodological standards to regulate the industry is next to impossible.

In fact, I would argue regulation is entirely the wrong way to go.

Benefits of competition among pollsters

Rather than focus on regulating polls, democracy would be better served if the number of election polls were increased during campaigns. Even going to the expense of offering polling companies tax breaks as inducements for mounting election polls would be worth considering given the stakes.

Increasing competition between pollsters would be beneficial for a number of reasons.  Most importantly:

  • The increased availability of polls would reduce the influence of outliers e.g., inaccurate, biased, or rogue polls.
  • Media would have a much wider choice of data points by which to formulate their stories on the public’s voting intentions. No doubt the task of writing an accurate account of what the polls say would be more difficult, but the challenge would inspire good journalism.
  • Greater competition would open up fresh thinking among participants, leading to more accurate polling data and a better understanding of what moves Canadians to vote as they do.

While it seems counterintuitive, increasing competition would not lead to chaos.

The reason?

Election polls are a very different animal from other forms of public opinion polling. There is a judgment day with predictions. Election Day results determine which predictions were accurate and which were not. It holds pollsters accountable for these predictions.

In that sense, competitive process is self regulating — it ensures the survival of the fittest and limits the proliferation of those that cannot make the grade.

Accuracy matters

It’s easy to dismiss the debate about the need for better accuracy from polls as some kind of petty food fight within the polling community.  After all, there is a mountain of social research revealing little consensus on any direct linkage between election polls and election outcomes.

But that completely misses the point.

Impact on the campaign narrative

Few would argue that when polls are combined with broad and intensive media coverage, they have a strong influence on the development of the public narrative during campaigns. That narrative determines the nature of public debate during election campaigns and influences how the public thinks and votes. The process can be quite complex as there are many factors that interact to produce voting decisions.

Crafting that narrative is the ongoing back-and-forth between polls, media, and the campaigns. Pollsters need to accept their responsibility in this engagement.

Yet in Canada, the polling community is still debating if polls influence electoral outcomes. In doing so, it hides behind the façade of a scientific model that pretends polls are simply a tool that measures public opinion but does not influence its essential nature.

This was the thinking in physics a century ago when physicists realized that scientific model simply didn’t work. It was replaced by quantum physics which understood that the act of measuring an activity changes the essential nature of the activity, the so-called Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The time is long overdue for polling to make the leap into modernity. Pollsters need to address the complex process of how polling impacts voting intentions and behaviour through media dissemination.

Making sense of puzzling election results

The 2011 Canadian Federal election is a good example of just how complex this process can be.

In that election, the polls missed all the big stories. Pollsters had a hard time explaining why the NDP caught fire in Québec and decimated the Bloc Québecois. They also completely missed the magnitude of the Liberal collapse in Ontario that gave the Conservatives their majority government.

When respondents lie

Explanations for these politically seismic events can be found if one allows for the possibility that polls, through the agency of media, can influence voter intentions, and that voters don’t always reveal these intentions to pollsters.

These social dynamics suggest that the NDP wave would never have happened if the polls were not reporting its surge through various media during the campaign.

They also explain how the polls missed the depth of voter disaffection with the Liberals in Ontario. Many Liberal voters in traditional Liberal strongholds secretly rebelled but kept their decision to vote Conservative to themselves to avoid disapproval from those around them.  It’s not unlike the situation in Italy where polls consistently underreported Berlusconi’s popularity because many respondents were “too embarrassed” to publicly admit their approval of him.

In failing to predict the outcome of the 2011 Federal election, the polls revealed that they were not only measuring the effectiveness of the political campaign, they had become part of it.  And as part of it, they failed to fully factor in their role, with the help of media, in influencing voter opinion.

Lastly, having made the argument for greater competition, there is little argument needed for greater transparency.

The press and the public are entitled to a comprehensive disclosure of methodological practices with published surveys. A fair bit of this is in place already but it could stand improvement, particularly in the areas of sample coverage as it relates to different methodologies, the differences in response rates between these methodologies, weighted versus unweighted marginal counts, the exact wording of poll questions, and a complete list of poll sponsors.

However, while such data may be useful to the trained eye in revealing methodological concerns, they offer no guarantee for revealing the accuracy of predictions.

Role of the press in contributing to poll accuracy

Make no mistake.  As the public narrative develops over the course of a political campaign, accuracy of election polls cannot be separated from how well the press interprets these polls.

Polls, regardless of how accurate the methodology, cannot survive an inaccurate interpretation in the press, just as the press, regardless of how well intentioned, cannot survive inaccurate polls.  The two are joined at the hip.

In this context, regulating polls to ensure accuracy implies regulating the press for the same end.  It is not only technically impossible to do, it goes against one of the most venerated rights of our democracy — a free press.

Instead of asking if polls should be regulated, the more relevant question is: How can the public debate during political campaigns be improved to more accurately reflect public sentiment?

To that end, regulation would be a poor choice of solutions. The answer lies with more competition, more transparency, and a more discerning media.

This article was originally posted on December 6, 2011 in the iPolitics special feature “78 Ways to fix the way we do Politics” under the title “Should election polls be regulated?“

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Can media be trusted to accurately report polls?

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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Reassurances from pollsters on the accuracy of results are suspect due to an obvious conflict of interest.  They’re marketing their product. The press also has a conflict of interest.  Media organizations often commission these polls.  Can you remember the last time a media organization has questioned the results of a poll it paid for? Even if a news organization has no financial stake in a poll, it usually doesn’t have the technical expertise to independently assess the poll’s accuracy.

Contradictory polls published during the current Ontario election campaign are just the latest example of the problem.  With pollsters criticizing each other’s methodology, the press seems helpless in deciding who’s right and who’s wrong.

Need for verification

Contradictory election polls create an obvious trust issue for the public.  While some polls may be right, others are definitely wrong. But trust issues also arise when published polls are not contradictory but where the published opinion is at odds with the real opinion held by the public. The public senses the dissonance; the press, confident in the science of polling, has no such doubts. The second situation is much harder to spot and remedy.

Obviously there is a need to somehow verify poll opinions. That’s easier said than done.
Traditionally, the press makes a big deal about independently verifying the accuracy of information in its investigative stories. The same standard of verification is curiously absent in its poll stories.

Why is that?  A poll, simply put, is an aggregated conversation on a common topic involving hundreds of individuals. Like any conversation, it’s easy to misinterpret its meaning.

So how does a media outlet verify (as much as it can) that the conversation was accurately reported? Usually it’s done by checking against results posted by other media outlets. (Of course if there is no consensus, as in the results from Ontario, this method is useless.)

If results are similar, all is well.  In this game, nobody wants to be the outlier. The problem with this approach is its reliance on herd mentality. The poll questions are not too different, the analyses are not too different, and press conclusions are not too different.

This can hardly be held as a reliable standard of independent confirmation of polling accuracy.

Checking for internal consistency

Perhaps more success can be had by stealing a page from what good detectives have been doing from time immemorial to crack their cases – checking for internal consistency.

Polls usually ask a bunch of questions on a topic of interest. So, for example, in America those opposed to raising the debt ceiling may see the national debt as a bigger problem than an economic downturn due to default. But an economic downturn implies a loss of jobs. If in fact the consistency check shows that lack of jobs is perceived as the bigger problem by most, then finding that many are opposed to raising the debt ceiling suggests the question has been improperly worded or improperly understood by respondents. Any definitive conclusion as to the nature of public opinion on the subject of increasing the debt ceiling needs to be hedged against this uncertainty.

When one applies this criterion of internal consistency to the multitude of stories carried by the press about the debt ceiling and the Obama health care reform debates, one comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the press disseminated an inaccurate description of public opinion as measured by the polls.

Example #1 – Raising the debt ceiling

According to the press, polls showed that America was deeply divided on raising the debt ceiling.  Half were opposed and were willing to entertain financial default, while half were in favor in order to prevent a financial calamity. Considering what was reported by other polls, this interpretation simply didn’t make any sense. Whether Republican or Democrat, polls have consistently shown that the top priority for most Americans (much higher than the debt issue) was to increase the availability of jobs.  Debt default would have tanked the economy, contributing to substantial job losses.

A closer examination of the questions asked by the polls showed that the key question was badly framed, forcing respondents to be seemingly in conflict with one another.  More importantly, the response to other questions asked by the polls revealed that this division was illusory. They showed that a majority of the public wanted the politicians to compromise.

If the press had focused on this message from the start instead of embracing it only at the end of the debate, Republicans would not have been emboldened to hold America hostage to extremist views.  An agreement to raise the ceiling may have been accomplished in an orderly fashion well ahead of the August 2 deadline.  As it was, the political debacle that ensued influenced S&P in downgrading the US credit rating.

Its confidence shaken, the US stock market lost over 1 trillion dollars in the first week of August.  The damage was not restricted to America.  Worldwide, market losses were estimated between $2.5 and $4 trillion.

Example #2 – Obama healthcare reforms

In the case of the healthcare reform debate, the press repeatedly cited polls showing that America was deeply divided in their support of the reforms. This conclusion was also highly misleading. A closer examination of other questions asked by the polls showed that by a large majority Americans were in favour of most of President Obama’s reforms. However, the public did express legitimate doubts about the economic viability of the reforms. The Congress and the President were certainly not helpful in assuaging these concerns.

The press, in typically simplistic fashion, focused on a question that showed half the country was opposed to President Obama’s handling of health care reform and half were in in favour of it.  In fact, public opposition was not due to the proposed reforms but to President Obama. It was a terrible question. Anything Mr. Obama proposed would have been opposed by alarmed Republican voters, even a health care system based on a Republican blueprint from current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Had the press focused on the common concerns of the majority of Americans rather than politically inspired divisions, there’s a good chance politicians would have been pressured by public opinion to behave more constructively. But that didn’t happen. In fact, ideological differences were so inflamed by the bitter debate that Republicans wanted to repeal the legislation after their midterm victory.

Why the press focus on the wrong questions

So why did the press choose to focus on the wrong question in their stories?

For the most part it was self-interest. Stories showing the public is in conflict, and divided into warring camps, produce an exciting narrative.  It attracts readers. Showing the public has opinions on which there is broad unanimity that transcend partisan differences is generally not perceived as exciting. When everyone agrees on a subject, where is the conflict? Without conflict, the narrative is one of unanimity. For the press, looking for a narrative that attracts readers, it’s nolo contendere. Conflict trumps unanimity every time.

Consequences of wrong choices

The problem with making the wrong choice, however, is that there are consequences. The public is deceived by the press as to what opinion it holds on important national issues.  Hence, instead of being united by opinion showing common purpose, the public is left with a sense of anger and frustration by reports of their illusory divisions. Instead of being united against political ineptitude, the public turns on itself.

For a fractured, dysfunctional Congress that revels in division, there could not be a more convenient outcome.  They saw their partisan divisions as a mirror of what was happening across the country. It justified their irresponsible behavior.

Responsibility of the press

For all the damage it has caused, the press seems to have no sense of responsibility for its role in this fraudulent exercise. It continues to see itself as simply a conduit of public opinion as discovered by the polls. If there’s any problem, the failure must lie with the polls. The editorial choices the press makes in how it reports on polls seem immune to criticism even though it seems clear that in its reporting of public opinion the press is actively influencing its essence in a nontrivial manner.  Why does this notion not seem to arouse any journalistic curiosity or suspicion.

Accurate reporting of public opinion by the press is a critical responsibility in a democracy.

The public relies on the press to cut through the partisan propaganda and deliver the facts as they are.  Between elections, the pressure of public opinion is an important lever in getting elected politicians to behave responsibly. That’s why the press should strive to achieve an accurate reflection of this opinion in their stories.  Focusing on ill-conceived poll questions whose primary justification is serving a narrative that sells papers is not the way to go.   Had the press shouldered its responsibility for accurately reporting public opinion, the politicians may have been shamed by good example of public sentiment into behaving like adults and not spoiled brats.

As for these wildly different Ontario election polls, we’ll know soon enough where the finger of shame points.

This story was originally posted on the iPolitics site on September 30, 2011

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Raising the Debt Ceiling: a Nation Divided, or Is It Just the Polls?

Posted on August 10, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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Polls have not done a good job of communicating public opinion in the debt ceiling debate.  In fact, they made a bad situation worse.

Creating the perception of a divided public

The polls would have you believe that half of America was ready and willing to push a fragile economy into another recession.   A  Pew Research poll published on July 11, shows that more Americans are concerned about the national debt than another economic meltdown. The poll finds that 47% are more concerned about the national debt increasing if the ceiling is raised, while only 42% are more concerned with America defaulting on its debt if the ceiling is not raised.  Given what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, and most economists regardless of their political stripe, have warned about the immediate economic consequences of default, the concern about the national debt in the near term seems completely irrational.  Is it something in the water they’re drinking, or is it something in the polling?

A closer examination reveals the question was both ill-conceived and poorly analyzed.  It suggested there was conflict and division within the public, when in fact the actual mood was one of compromise — simply wanting to get the problem solved.

Framing the question to find division

That same Pew poll shows that most Americans are concerned about both the national debt increasing if the debt ceiling is raised (78%), and the economy tanking if it isn’t (74%).  These aren’t two different groups in conflict with one another as suggested by the 47%/42% split.  For the most part they’re the same individuals.  It is how Pew Research frames this question (“which of these is your greater concern”) that makes it seem as if the country is divided into two conflicting camps.

Creating a false choice

Equating increased national debt if the ceiling is raised, and the economy tanking if it isn’t, is also a bit disingenuous because it ignores the chronology that makes the two ideas very different.  Raising the debt ceiling is something that needs to be done today.  The national debt problem is hugely complex.  It cannot be solved today.  More importantly, it doesn’t need to be solved today.  Forcing respondents to choose between the two is creating a false choice.  Americans don’t want one of two problems solved; they want both solved, together.

Shifting the focus to compromise

Perhaps sensing the inherent problem with their approach, Pew shifted focus in their analysis of a follow-up poll published in July 26, 2011, from division (” Public Now Divided on Debt Limit Debate”) to compromise (“Public Wants Ceiling Compromise, Expects a Deal before Deadline”).  The poll found that 68% of Americans believe that lawmakers should be willing to compromise, even if it means they strike a deal they disagree with.  Even a majority of Republican voters (53%) favored this “hold your nose” outcome.  Only 23% felt that lawmakers should stand by their principles even if it means the government goes into default.

While the shift in focus is commendable, Pew reported as far back as April that a majority (55%) were in favor of compromise. That should have been the message from Americans to their legislators all along.  It might have saved the country from much unnecessary drama.

Pew was not alone in finding the country divided.  Similar results were reported by other polls e.g., CBS ,Quinnipiac. Framing and interpreting the debt ceiling question as they did, created a message of national division. This fake message was used by Republicans as evidence that half the country was behind them.  In fact, all the public desired was compromise.

The bigger problem–an ill-informed public

Apart from the questionable framing of poll questions, polls have a big problem with the public’s lack of familiarity on the complex economic issues surrounding the debate.  The Pew poll found 41% of Americans confess to a poor understanding (“not too well” or “not at all well”) of what would happen if the government does not raise the federal debt limit.  As consequences were still being hotly debated by economic experts, it’s probably safe to say that even those who indicated they understood the consequences well, probably overstated their grasp of the problem.

Getting informed on a complex issue like the debt ceiling is key to making a sound decision.  A CBS poll found that those who are following the debate very closely showed far greater support (51% to 29%) in raising the debt ceiling than those who were not following it closely.  In effect, the more attention respondents paid to the issue, the more it became apparent to them that raising the debt ceiling was a necessary action.  Rising awareness of the consequences is perhaps the primary cause of the large shift of public opinion in the past few weeks in favor of raising the debt ceiling.  The role of media was critical in this process.

Partisan manipulation of the ill-informed by polls and media

The opposite side of that coin is that when the public is polled on complex topics about which they know little, it is very easy for polls, aided and abetted by intense media coverage, to influence opinion by the language used to formulate the questions. Given that public awareness of the issue ranges from those who are quite knowledgeable to those who know next to nothing, the polls find themselves in a rather tricky situation where in part they’re measuring independently acquired opinion among well-informed respondents, and in part essentially creating it from ill-informed respondents.

The latter is accomplished by framing questions in a way that allow respondents to answer by relying on partisan verbal cues, not on any independent insight on the issue.  The verbal cues are associated with poll answers by means of a conditioning process. This conditioning is driven by an intense media bombardment of partisan positions of the debt ceiling issue emanating out of Washington.  Simply put, if you are Republican leaning, the media conditioned response is “No” to raising the debt ceiling; if Democrat leaning, the media conditioned response is “Yes”.  For ill informed respondents, answering a poll question on an issue they know next to nothing about is made easy.

In part this explains the high partisan correlation with questions related to support for ceiling increases.  Pew found that 54% of Democrats supported increasing the debt ceiling compared to only 27% of Republicans.  A similar partisan outcome emerged in the health care reform debate where, if you believed the polls, Americans were evenly divided in their support of reforms that significantly enhanced health care benefits for most of them.  My earlier post examines in some detail how this situation arose.

Polls need to accurately measure opinion, not to make it

When the issue under debate is complex leaving many Americans confused and uncertain about what positions to take, it is easy for polls driven by intense media coverage to influence these individuals to respond in a partisan fashion that does not reflect genuine, independent opinion on the subject.  In this case the polls simply confirm the success of partisan propaganda campaigns.  Pollsters need to be especially vigilant in how they frame their questions and analyze the data in order to discern genuine public opinion and not polarize public opinion along partisan lines.

On this point, it is troubling that polls and media coverage generally have framed the public choices in the debt ceiling debate as between reducing the debt through program cuts versus severe economic downturn in case of default.  Completely ignored is what most Americans regard as the nation’s biggest problem–the lack of jobs.  Many economists believe this may require significant government stimulus that would temporarily increase the debt.  By ignoring this choice in their questions, the polls have in effect bought into the Republican agenda thus politicizing the outcome.

With a rising chorus of anger, Americans, their patience exhausted, insisted that their seemingly incapable elected representatives do the job for which they were elected.  Maybe some of that anger should be directed at polls that failed to adequately gauge public opinion and helped protract the crisis to the last day.

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Do Polls Work?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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In an article posted on June 17, 2011 on the iPolitics website, Frank Graves, head of the polling firm EKOS , attempted to explain why his final poll failed so badly in predicting the Conservative majority in the 2011 Federal Election. The EKOS poll predicted the Conservative popular vote as 33.9%, almost 6% lower than its actual popular vote of 39.6% on Election Day. While raising the question of whether polls worked as a barometer of public opinion, he concluded that the poll was in fact “accurate”, but it applied to all eligible voters, not merely those who voted. His lengthy defence of EKOS methodology did little to answer the obvious question of why measure a group from which we know many will not vote, and therefore will not be a good basis for predicting the election outcome.

The point of these election polls as Mr. Graves himself notes, is to predict the winner of the horserace.  That is why the public is interested in reading stories that predict election results. That is why newspapers commission polls and publish stories that predict election results. And that is why pollsters use every trick in the book to make sure their polls are as close as possible to the election results. Nobody (and perhaps this is a failing) is interested in election polls for the purpose of “modeling the population of all eligible voters”. It’s all about bragging rights.

But to be fair to Mr. Graves, it’s not just EKOS that blew it. All the polls did. In spite of methodological differences between different pollsters, in spite of different demographic weighting schemes to ensure coincidence with the actual vote, in spite of different methods to deal with undecided voters, in spite of different techniques to identify the likelihood that a respondent will actually vote, they all blew it. This suggests the polls were missing something big, something happening on a societal scale and not the result of a statistical technicality in how the polls were conducted.

This “something big” is the development of public opinion on party preference, and how opinion polls combined with stories in the media influenced this development. For pollsters, the regrettable reality is that sometimes polls can measure this, and sometimes they cannot. In situations they cannot, it is because the public chooses not to share their opinions with the pollster. If so, there is not much that Mr. Graves, or anyone else for that matter, can do to get a reliable prediction of voters’ intentions. By rejecting the possibility of this situation as “implausible”, Mr. Graves is led to what I believe is an even more implausible conclusion — that his poll was measuring the wrong group.

In his analysis, Mr. Graves dismisses the possibility of polls influencing the election by noting that only 21% of voters indicated that polls had either a “moderate” or “great extent” in influencing their decisions. But surely this understates the problem. Poll results are often embedded in press stories that discuss broader political issues such as differences in party platforms and leadership styles. Polls also influence the writers of the stories, even when they are not referenced directly. Also, some would find the question insulting as it trivializes their decision process which may well be influenced by polls.   A more relevant question would be whether stories in the press about the election affected the public’s final decision on Election Day. There is little doubt that the numbers agreeing on the influence of the press would be substantially higher than 21%.

A sociological theory corroborated experimentally that explains the relationship between the development of public opinion and how that opinion is measured by polls, was propounded by Dr. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in her book “The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin “. The theory describes specific situations in which survey respondents are willing to share their opinions as well as situations in which they are not. This is exactly what happened into 2011 Federal Election and has been described in some detail in my earlier post.

Finally, it should be noted that evidence mounted by Mr. Graves from the follow-up survey (after the election) conducted by EKOS was entirely consistent with the spiral of silence theory in which certain segments of the Canadian population revealed their true opinions on party preference, while others did not due to their  concern about social consequences. Specifically, of those who indicated they voted in the May 2 election, 37.9% said they voted Conservative. This figure is much closer to the actual vote of 39.6% compared to the final pre-election poll of 33.9%. Clearly, after the election, the Conservative majority was public knowledge and as predicted by the theory there was little disinclination on the part of those voters who lied from revealing their true party preferences.

Secondly, Mr. Graves notes that 21% of voters admitted to shifting their voting preference from the beginning of the election. That’s about as close as one can hope for in getting voters to admit that they lied in the pre-election polls. The 21% makes the 6% difference in Conservative popular vote between pre-election polls and actual vote quite reasonable. To this point it’s worth noting that the Conservative majority resulted in only a 2% increase in popular vote from the 2008 election when they were handed a minority government.

So we have come full circle to Mr. Graves initial question: Do polls “work”?  If they do work, the process as I have sketched out is far more complex than pollsters would have you believe. Secondly, polling has matured although it must be said, not well.

Long ago the idea of public opinion polling was a noble one, with a generally accepted understanding that this was an instrument to reduce the democratic deficit. Today, like television, radio and other innovative technologies, its practice has brought it into disrepute. Instead of a tool to enhance democracy it has become simply one of an arsenal of propaganda tools used by corporations and governments to promote their interests. These end users of polls know full well how effectively public opinion can be manipulated through the agency of media. Yet somehow neither the polls nor the media seem to be willing to confront this essential truth. By hewing to this fiction they have dangerously narrowed the scope of public debate by allowing polls to misinform the public, often treating ignorance as opinion.

Perhaps in today’s time, the right question to ask is not whether polls work, but who are they working for.

This story was originally posted on the iPolitics site on July 10, 2011

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How Polls Influenced the Outcome of the 2011 Canadian Federal Election

Posted on June 16, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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Canadians gave Stephen Harper’s Conservatives a majority government in possibly the strangest election in Canadian electoral history.  Conservatives ended up with 167 seats, 24 more than before, while both Liberals and Bloc Québecois were demolished with their respective leaders, Michael Ignatieff and Gilles Duceppe, resigning in the aftermath.  The Liberals lost over half their seats ending up with 34, while the Bloc Québecois lost almost all their seats.

The big winner was the NDP.  It gained 102 seats nationally, almost 3 times their seat count in the 2008 election and the highest total ever achieved by the NDP party.  This stunning performance also made them the official opposition to the Conservatives.  Even more remarkable was their achievement in Québec.  In winning 58 seats in Québec (up from only one in 2008), the NDP crushed the Bloc Québecois leaving it with an embarrassing four seats from their previous majority of 49.

The additional 24 seats that lifted the Conservatives from a minority to a majority status represent an increased seat count of 17%.  Remarkably, Elections Canada data show the popular vote for Conservatives increased by only 2% from 2008 (from 37.6% to 39.6% in 2011).

These extraordinary results were not predicted by the polls.

Poll predictions

While showing Conservatives as the most popular party, the polls predicted a minority, not a majority government.  Four polls completed just prior to Election Day showed Conservative support ranging from 37.1% to 33.9%, with a mean value of 35.8%.  The latter figure was below the Conservatives popular vote in 2008, leading the experts to the prediction of a minority government.

Secondly, while showing reduced popular support for the Liberals in Ontario, none of the polls predicted the utter collapse of the party in Ontario, and in particular Toronto, their historic stronghold.  It is this collapse that gave Harper his majority.

Thirdly, while the polls accurately captured the rise of the NDP wave and there was speculation this would translate into “a lot of seats”, nobody was predicting that the party, an anglophone federalist party, would effectively wipe out the sovereigntist Bloc in Québec.  Historically, NDP support during a campaign would dissipate by Election Day.

The unexpected massive and sudden rise of NDP popularity left both the pundits and the public scratching their heads.  What was the tectonic event that triggered the NDP wave?

Was there an issue during the campaign that stirred the public and attracted support for the NDP?  Not that anyone can recall.  The campaign was notable for the absence of any issue debate that might distinguish the parties.

In the absence of issues, the sole discriminating factor was the public’s perception of the party leaders… and a mechanism that catapulted one of them into public favor.

The public’s perception of party leaders

According to polls, the leader Canadians trusted most was NDP’s Jack Layton.  A Nanos poll found that Jack scored with 33% of Canadians compared to 24% for Stephen Harper and only 11% for Michael Ignatieff. An Angus Reid poll echoed these results, showing 49% of Canadians were satisfied with how Jack was doing his job, compared to 31% for Stephen and only 22% for Michael.

Walking with a cane due to a recent hip surgery and recovering from a bout of prostate cancer, pundits at the start of the campaign questioned whether Jack had the physical stamina to run a campaign and whether the need for a cane would portray him as weak.  The public saw him quite differently.  Here was a man who would fight for a health system that gave him a future.  When he spoke of his support for universal health care in Canada, no one doubted his sincerity.  It wasn’t political.  It was personal.  When he raised his cane in front of a cheering public, the cane became a shibboleth.  It wasn’t an instrument of weakness; it was a weapon of battle.  You can’t buy better advertising than that.

The mechanism for the NDP wave

So how did this trusted leader become the rage in Québec and beyond?

The love affair between Jack and Canadian voters started on April 12, the night of the leaders English language debate.  A before and after poll by Angus Reid indicated that while 42% thought that Stephen Harper had won (versus 25% for Jack Layton and 23% for Michael Ignatieff), 55% of respondents said their impression of Jack Layton had improved as a consequence of the debate.  Perhaps more importantly, on the following night when the leaders debated in French, Léger Marketing reported that while 41% felt that Gilles Duceppe had won, Jack Layton came in second with 20% followed by Michael Ignatieff with 15% and Stephen Harper with 11%.  These numbers came at a time when Jack’s party had a national support of about 15% of Canadian voters compared to about 40% for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

However it wasn’t until about a week later on about April 19, after the public and the press had a chance to digest this event, that polls began to show a substantial uptick for the NDP in Québec.  At the same time the polls were reporting that Bloc Québecois popularity was continuing to deteriorate.  This upward trend caught the attention of the press, particularly in Québec, but nobody could say at the time if this was a transient effect or something significant.

For many voters, seeing and hearing about this uptick was an important signal.  It provided confirmation that there were other voters who had decided that the NDP was an acceptable alternative to the Bloc Québecois.  In the minds of many, it validated their up to this point private decision to support the party.

As more voters were drawn into the NDP camp, their increasing numbers were measured by numerous polls that were tracking party support.  This created a feedback loop in which press stories about the rising popularity of the NDP emboldened increasing numbers of Québec voters to cast their support in favor of the NDP.  It is this feedback loop involving the interaction of the polls, the press and the public that amplified the initial trickle of NDP support to a veritable tsunami that stunned the province.

To put it bluntly, without the timely, positive NDP polls, there would not have been this massive NDP wave.

In turning to the NDP, Québec voters not only revealed their willingness to trust Jack Layton and, by association only, his young band of politically inexperienced and unknown candidates, they were also telling the traditional recipients of their vote — the Bloc Québecois, the Conservatives and the Liberals — that they wanted a new vision for Québec, a vision they did not trust these parties to deliver.  In this context it’s worth noting that while the Bloc Québecois lost all but four of their 49 seats, both the Liberals and Conservatives lost about half of their Québec seats.  It was a truly bold, risky move by Québec voters who once again showed English Canada just how politically astute and sophisticated they are.

The effects of this tsunami were not restricted to Québec where the NDP’s popular vote increased to a whopping 43% in 2011 election, up from a mere 12% in the 2008 election.

Substantial increases in the NDP popular vote were found in most other provinces as well. In Ontario, the NDP vote increased from 18% to 26%; in British Columbia, from 26% to 33%; in New Brunswick, from 22% to 30%; and in Saskatchewan, from 26% to 32%.  The orange wave even affected the bastion of conservatism Alberta, where NDP support increased from 13% to 17%.  This tsunami created waves everywhere.

Not only did the magnitude of the NDP wave reveal the power of this feedback process to move public opinion, it also refuted the claim of some experts that the conduct and dissemination of polling information does not influence election results.

The Spiral of Silence

The election results are in fact consistent with the theory of political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann of how mass media impacts public opinion.  In her book “The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin” she proposes the idea that there is a gap between the opinion held by an individual and the social consensus on that opinion.  She theorizes that most people have a general sense of how far removed their opinion is from consensus.  If they feel the gap is large, they tend to keep the opinion to themselves to avoid potential social isolation.  If the gap is small, social isolation is not an issue and the opinion is communicated publicly.

The latter was the case in Québec where increasing public support for the NDP was reflected in broad-based press coverage and in increasing poll numbers.  By the end of the campaign, the poll numbers were close to the popular vote of the NDP in Québec.

In Ontario however, this gap was large as the press was predicting some Liberal weakness but definitely not a total collapse.  Also there was no prediction of a Conservative sweep.  On Election Day, the Conservative popular vote was 44.4%, substantially higher than the 39-41% figures reported by final polls.  Also, most of these polls overestimated Liberal and NDP support in the province compared to the popular vote.

Again this is consistent with the spiral of silence theory whereby some voters decided to switch to the Conservative side but were not prepared to admit this in polls since it was at odds with the prevailing media opinion.

Polls can and do influence election results, mainly because they can create media driven narratives that influence voter decisions, as was the case in this election.

While the idea of polls influencing election results may seem farfetched for many Canadians, in the US there is no such naïveté.  Partisan polling is a reality in many US state and federal elections.  Polling companies run by Republican pollsters have been found to produce results with a Republican bias, and ditto for Democrats.  For example, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s re-election was almost derailed by polls that during the campaign showed him consistently trailing his Republican, Tea Party supported adversary Sharron Angle.  While on Election Day Harry Reid emerged victorious, the biased polls managed to create a false narrative that his competitor had much stronger voter support than she actually did.  In the minds of Nevada voters, this created more legitimacy to Sharron Angle as a viable alternative to Harry Reid. In this case the polls were wrong.

Clearly, polls can influence election results, either for the good or the bad.  For pollsters this places more responsibility on their shoulders to ensure that their polls are accurate and are not responsible for the creation of false narratives that can negatively influence results on Election Day.  Given their sketchy record on accuracy or even if, according to the spiral of silence theory, accuracy is possible, one wonders whether the pollsters can rise to the challenge.

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What Did Polls Really Tell Us about Public Opinion on the Obama Health Care Bill?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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Polls on the Obama health care reforms bill raised troubling questions about the validity of their results. In particular, how did the American public answer polling questions about this complex piece of legislation when, by their own admission, most said it was confusing and hard to understand? And if confused, how did polls find Americans deeply divided on the subject?

With the help of leading questions and an uncritical, self serving media, easier than you might imagine.

Social conditioning of respondents

As described in “How Polls Divided Americans on the Obama Health Care Reforms“, most polls relied on questions with preformatted responses. These responses employed wording that prompted a media conditioned response on the part of respondents in a predictable partisan direction. The conditioning was driven by a mass media bombardment of the public by highly partisan health care reform messages emanating out of the rancorous congressional debate. It was therefore not surprising that the response to many of the questions was highly correlated to respondents’ political affiliation (Republican, Democrat, or Independent).

It was a Pavlovian experiment on a national scale.

To answer the poll questions, the public did not need to know the particulars of health care reform. They simply had to connect a preformatted response with a partisan position. Bingo! Next question please. In effect, the surveys were not measuring opinion, they were creating it.

In the end, the polling results told us very little about where the public stood on the merits of the legislation, and how it would affect their lives. However, they did reveal what the large majority of Americans was certain of, namely

  • the need to completely rebuild the health-care system around certain principles, and
  • a profound sense of confusion as to how Obamacare was to work.

 

Listening to respondents

Instead of pollsters feeding Americans prepackaged responses to specific reforms about which they knew very little, it would have been much more meaningful to simply ask respondents to describe in their own words what they favored or opposed in the reforms. Instead of the pollster creating the agenda, the onus of creating the agenda would be shifted to the respondent.

This is exactly what one pollster did. In March of 2010, Gallup asked a representative national sample of over one thousand respondents to describe in their own words why they favored or opposed the health-care bill. Then Gallup laboriously coded all this information to identify the most popularly shared opinions and beliefs. The results are summarized in the tables below.

What is the main reason you favor such a health-care bill?*

Based on Americans who advised their member of Congress to vote for a health-care bill**

Gallup Mar4-7,2010

People need health insurance/too many uninsured 29%
System is broken/needs to be fixed 18%
Costs are out of control/would help control costs 12%
Moral responsibility to provide/obligation/fair 12%
Would make healthcare more affordable 10%
Don’t trust insurance companies 5%
Respondent or family member currently lacks coverage 4%
To help senior citizens 4%
To help the poor 3%
Other 1%
No particular reason 1%
No opinion   ***

 

What is the main reason you oppose a health-care bill?*

Based on Americans who would advise their member of Congress to vote against a health-care bill**

Will raise costs of insurance/make it less affordable 20%
Does not address real problems 19%
Need more information/clarity on how system would work 8%
Against big government/too much government involvement (general) 8%
Government should not be involved in health care 7%
Healthcare is a privilege, not an entitlement 6%
With cost government too much/too much spending/increase the deficit 5%
People should not be required to buy health insurance 5%
Would affect respondent’s current health insurance 4%
Socialism/socialized medicine 4%
Oppose the “public option” proposal 3%
Rushing it through process/should take more time 3%
Would hurt senior citizens/Medicare 3%
Would pay for abortions 2%
Has not worked in other countries 1%
Illegal immigrants would benefit –
Other 1%
No reason in particular –
No opinion 1%

                                                                                                   

*Note the question asked respondents to describe “the main reason” for favoring or opposing the health-care bill. Many respondents had more than one reason, and provided multiple responses to this question. Unfortunately Gallup coders selected only one reason per respondent. This decision underestimated the actual totals in some response categories.

**Gallup relied on a question that used politically charged wording (“Would you advise your representative in Congress to vote for or against the health-care reform bill similar to the one proposed by President Obama?”) to categorize respondents as being in favor or opposed to the bill. If a respondent was torn between the pros and cons of healthcare reform but opposed Obama for a whole range of other reasons, that respondent would not be asked how they favored health care reform, only how they opposed it.  For a respondent who supported Obama it would be the reverse scenario. A less polarizing support/oppose question would have been better as it would have more fully revealed the internal tensions stimulated by this complex legislation.

***Less than 0 .5%

 

The “prompting” effect

It is quite striking to see how opposition to health care reform provisions can skyrocket when it is prompted (asked as an explicit question with prepackaged response choices) versus the unprompted rate from the table above. For example, a CNN poll from March of 2010, about the same time as the Gallup poll, found that for the provision requiring “all Americans who do not have health insurance to get it”, the prompted response was 53% in opposition. Unprompted, the above table shows the opposition was only 5%. So where does the truth lie, closer to 53% or to 5%?

Abortion is another example. Unprompted, only 2% say they oppose the health-care bill because it would be used to pay for abortions. When prompted by an explicit question, the percentage who oppose jumps to 33%.

Pollsters would have you believe that prompted responses are more accurate since they simply remind respondents of forgotten but genuine, self inspired opinion. This is pure poppycock! The large majority of respondents have admitted that health care reforms are confusing. In light of this, the main function of prompts is to stimulate responses that are conditioned by a pervasive and partisan media exposure. There is very little “genuine or self inspired” about this.

From the perspective of the press, prompted responses deliver headline fodder. “Americans Oppose Forced Purchase of Health Care Insurance” would be a legitimate headline in the above example. But if it were explained to respondents that forced purchase is a necessary condition to realize a bunch of other reform goodies they strongly support, the degree of opposition to it may diminish dramatically.  With something as complex as health care reform, it is important that polls explore the consequences of such tradeoffs, particularly if the public admits to being ill-informed on the subject.

But trying to understand such complexities does not sell papers. Feeding a conflict driven, adversarial, partisan narrative, however, does. This, more than anything, accounts for the deep public divisions on health care reform reported by the press.

The priorities in respondents’ own words

The other noteworthy observation about the tables is the diversity of reasons — 10 in the favor group and 17 in the oppose group. Some in the latter read like they came straight out of the GOP playbook, and to be fair, some in the former read like they came straight out of the Democratic playbook.

That said, we find that these diverse reasons fall into three broad categories for both groups. They are:

1. The healthcare system is broken. Those in favor (18%) believe Mr. Obama’s plan fixes it. Those opposed believe it doesn’t (19%) or require more information (8%) and time (3%) to understand how it works.

2. Ideological differences. Those in favor believe it is a moral responsibility for the nation to care for those who succumb to disease and illness (52%). Those opposed disagree and are extremely concerned about the encroachment of big government in the lives of its citizens (33%).

3. Economic concerns. Many who are opposed believe that the fix would be economically disastrous for the country (32%). Those in favor believe Mr. Obama’s claim that his fix will reduce health costs in the long term (22%).

Economic uncertainties of the bill

The 32% figure for those who oppose health-care reforms because they would be disastrous for the economy is an underestimate since, as noted earlier, Gallup did not count multiple responses. A closer examination of the multiple responses in the verbatim comments provided by Gallup suggests the correct figure is 39%, about four of every 10 naysayers. Given all the uncertainty as to how the health-care bill will work as well as the economic crisis in which the country finds itself, it is perhaps not surprising that so many respondents who oppose the reforms question it on economic grounds.

Some examples of comments related to economic concerns are listed below:

  • “We cannot afford it.”
  • “It’s a trillion dollars. It’s too much. I’m not paying for anybody else’s healthcare”
  • “I just think it’s going to cost too much for what we’re going to get for it”
  • “Expensive. The deficit’s going to go through the roof”
  • “I feel like my taxes will increase to support those who do not have health care”
  • “Too expensive and the United States can’t afford it. We’re broke.”
  • “Because it is going to screw everybody, everyone that has insurance now, their costs are going to skyrocket.”
  • “We’re in debt, and he wants to spend another trillion dollars, and it’s not gonna to work.”
  • “The unknown costs, everything that is buried in there that is going to increase taxes or deficit.”

 

With all the political wrangling in Congress, it is unlikely the ideological divide will be breached between the two sides. If however Mr. Obama can show the reforms deliver significant health savings, there is a chance to reduce public resistance to his reforms. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, there is little likelihood for this providential outcome. In his New York Times column, David Brooks addresses some of the key economic projections of the health-care reform bill and notes that economists predict that projected costs would underestimate real costs by almost $1 trillion by 2019.

Insurance company profits

It seems the fly in the ointment in all this are the private health insurance companies and the wretched deal Mr. Obama made with them to gain their support. Reforming the system to provide adequate but less costly health care fundamentally conflicts with what is best for the patient versus what is best for the insurance company. The primary purpose of a private health insurance company, like any other company, is to earn profits for its shareholders. The primary purpose of a doctor or hospital ministering to a person who is ill is to bring them back to health. One of the major complaints of many doctors today is the amount of time they need to haggle with insurance companies to insure their patients get the necessary medical treatment. In effect insurance adjusters try to override medical decisions for which they have no qualifications to ensure that company profits are protected.

Even with millions of new clients seeking health care insurance, this conflict is inherently impossible to resolve. That is why most other industrially advanced democracies have taken financial profits out of the health-care cost equation and have designated health care as a responsibility of the state. Some may argue that this step is tantamount to godless socialism. Others might argue that this is simply an act of Christian charity conducted on a grand scale.

The bankruptcy cliff

But whether one sees this as godless socialism or Christian charity, the fact remains that the government cannot allow costs to escalate to the point where it bankrupts the nation. If nothing is done to remedy the costs, they will climb to about one fifth of total GDP by 2017. At present about 40% of all Americans have either no health insurance or are inadequately insured. Yet the per capita cost of US health care for Americans is about two times that of Canadians.

The single-payer alternative

In Canada there is a single-payer system where costs are regulated by the government but where doctors and hospitals are free to run their own medical businesses. Public health care in Canada has become part of what it means to be Canadian. It is a social compact where all Canadians agree that if one of them is ill, that person is cared for through their illness by all Canadians  Like in The Three Musketeers, it’s  all for one and one for all. Secondly, no queue jumping is allowed. Priority is determined by medical urgency, not by size of wallet. Public health care has been in operation for decades and contrary to what is heard on Fox News, the system works fairly efficiently with most Canadians regarding it as a sacrosanct institution.

One final note. With a conservative Canadian government far more right-wing than the Obama administration, there is no talk of repealing Canada’s health care legislation, and so far as I know, little danger Canada going Communist in the foreseeable future.

Oleh Iwanyshyn is a Canadian pollster with over 30 years of experience in the profession. In the spirit of full disclosure, he has used the Canadian health care system and is still alive to tell the tale.

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How Polls Divided Americans on Obama’s Health Care Reforms

Posted on March 10, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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In theory, polls on the Obama health care reforms were supposed to measure public attitudes.

In fact, they helped create them.

How did this happen? What were these polling fictions? How did the tail end up wagging the dog?

The answers can be found by examining the design and impact of the many polls commissioned by the nation’s most influential media organs including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN among others, over the past year and a half.

If you believe the polls, Obama’s health care reform legislation is a disaster. With the ink barely dry from the legislation signed into law last March, the polls are reporting that large numbers of Americans are in favor of its repeal.

But is it the public that has soured? Or did the polling process fail the public?

Confused public

The health care reform legislation is quite complex. The bill the President signed totals about 2400 pages. In comparison the Civil Rights Act needed only 8 pages. Many Americans quite understandably have had a hard time imagining how all the different parts worked. The task was made more difficult by the avalanche of ideological propaganda from both sides but particularly from the GOP. Confidence in the legislation was also damaged by the behind the scene deals made by the Administration in order to gain sufficient votes for its passage in Congress. One such deal resulted in the popular “public option” being cut from the legislation.

In the end, Americans were left in a high state of confusion as to whether these reforms would benefit them personally and the country as a whole. Numerous polls have attested to this high degree of public confusion.

  • 59%-67% indicate that health care proposals are “confusing” – CBS News/New York Times
  • 63%-69% say the debate is “hard to understand” — Pew
  • 75% agree that the proposals are “so complicated it is hard for the average American to understand [them]” — Bloomberg

Most Americans learned about the particulars of this legislation from the media. The media focus was on the rancorous and often not very educating congressional debate between Republicans and Democrats. Ideological, simplistic, often resorting to half-truths and even outright lies, the primary purpose of these debates was to score political points. This became the substance of the public’s education on these complex reforms.

Conditioning the public

Saturated by propaganda from every conceivable media source, the public responded in an entirely predictable way. If a person was a Democrat-leaning voter they would see virtue in the legislation by having it associated with phraseology like “health insurance for all Americans”, “no insurance restrictions on pre-existing medical conditions”, “coverage for children up to 25 years” and so on. If a person was a Republican-leaning voter they would see the legislation as anathema by having it associated with phraseology like “job killer”, “socialized medicine”, “big government control over individual Americans”, and so on.

On the important issue of economic consequences, Democrat-leaning voters were told by President Obama that if this legislation were not adopted, the country would soon go broke due to runaway medical costs. Republican-leaning voters were told the opposite by their leaders — that the country would go broke if the legislation were to become law.

This partisan labeling process initiated by the opposing parties but reinforced by massive media indoctrination,  conditioned the American public to accept or reject specific reforms on a most superficial level of understanding. Sadly this was as close as most Americans ever got to understanding the complexities of Mr. Obama’s health care reforms.

Partisan polling

Polls conducted to measure public attitudes to the reforms confirmed this polarization. They did so by capitalizing on the partisan, media driven conditioning process. The preformatted questions employed in the surveys often used phraseology or labels that came straight out of the polarizing congressional debate. These labels prompted respondents to answer survey questions in a predictably partisan way as conditioned by mass media indoctrination. This is apparent when analyzing the response to the questions. Most are highly correlated to respondents’ political affiliation (Republican, Democrat, or Independent). Few Americans had a depth of understanding of the specifics of health care reform to respond to the questions in a personal way, independent of political influences.

Perception of a divided public

Not only did polling do little to further our understanding of what health care reform meant to individual Americans, the polling results were used by media to strengthen the perception that the American public was bitterly divided in their support of this legislation. Most polls showed a plurality of Americans disapproved of Mr. Obama’s handling of health care reform legislation, and about half were in favor of its repeal. However to suggest as some media reports have done, that this reaction means half of America is against health care reform is completely unwarranted.

The evidence comes from the polls themselves.

Public support for health care reform

When asked about what should be the goals of health care reform, about 90% of all Americans indicated that it was important to find a way to get health insurance for those who are uninsured, to prevent insurance companies from refusing to ensure people with pre-existing conditions, and to prevent insurance companies from dropping persons due to illness. About six out of every 10 said these goals were “critically important”. Only one of every 10 said they were not important. These goals remain at the core of Mr. Obama’s health care reforms. Other goals were less popular but still had the support of a majority of Americans.

Secondly, Pew Research polls reported that 71% to 76% of Americans felt that the US health care system needed to be completely rebuilt or fundamentally changed. The status quo was unacceptable. One would conclude that if Obamacare was to be faulted, it would be because the changes it proposed were not fundamental enough.

The divide revealed

So what is really behind this great divide? Apart from the media driven partisan conditioning process, the complexity of the legislation itself helped to create this polarization. Even if respondents supported most elements of the reforms, one or two provisions that they strongly resisted e.g., 60% oppose the legal requirement that everyone buy health insurance, may have been enough to pull the plug on their overall support for the reforms. Similarly, repeal could relate to all of the legislation or specific provisions. Secondly, opposition to reforms could exist because a) the legislation went too far, or b) it didn’t go far enough. While polls show that more feel it went too far, the numbers saying it didn’t go far enough is significant.

Interpreting public support for health care reform (or lack of it) from the above questions is not at all obvious. While the press is attracted to these questions because of their combative, adversarial overtones, their meaning is steeped in ambiguity. If anything, they seem to represent some vague, symbolic notion of how displeased Americans are with all the political theatrics surrounding something they sense is really important rather than opposition to health care reform.

Sensitivity to question wording

Public unfamiliarity with the reform proposals was also evident in how much attitudes towards health reform shifted when a poll question included a preamble that explained some specifics of the reforms. For example, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that the 36% saying that Obama’s health care reform plan was a “good idea” jumps to 56% favorable rating in a follow-up question that briefly describes the plan. Without a developed point of view, responses are easily influenced by question wording and question order in addition to the influences noted above.

Sensitivity to question wording is but one of a number of ways the polls revealed how badly the American public misunderstands (or was led to misunderstand) the health care reforms. The polls also revealed monumental misapprehensions, contradictions, and irrational adherence to political propaganda.

Public misapprehensions

Polls have reported that large numbers of Americans are concerned that reforms will lead to government money being used to pay for:

  • health care for illegal immigrants (37%),
  • abortions (33%),
  • rationing of health care (35%), or
  • death panels in which government officials will determine how much health care ailing Americans are to receive (30%)

These are obvious fabrications probably disseminated by enemies of Mr. Obama’s health care reforms. Public response to these issues reveals not only how little Americans know about the reforms, but also on the effectiveness of mass media to condition the American public to political messages regardless of whether these messages are truthful or not. In this context, the polls performed a useful function in revealing this susceptibility.

Contradictions

While the majority of Americans seem to support the idea of universal coverage, the majority also is opposed to forcing Americans to buy health insurance. Requiring by law that everyone has health insurance is the mechanism by which universal coverage is achieved in Obamacare. By that logic, if you oppose one you also oppose the other. Again, this reveals insufficient public understanding of this complex piece of legislation.

On an interesting side note, forcing those without health insurance to buy it was a method pioneered by the Republican state administration of Mitt Romney. The irony for President Obama is that even when borrowing a health care reform idea inspired by Republicans, he still gets no respect from Republicans.

Blind adherence

Then there are results that can only be explained by blind political, ideological adherence, such as the reported 35% of Americans who say they oppose Obamacare reforms because they make it illegal for private medical insurance companies to reject clients with pre-existing conditions. Unless this was a survey conducted solely amongst private health insurers, this doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would any respondent, be they Republican or Democrat, want an insurance company to reject them for a pre-existing condition?

Conclusions

Using pre-formatted questions with hot button phraseology straight from Congress, all the polls could do was mirror the confusion and social conditioning of Americans and, as interpreted by the press, reinforce the mistaken perception that half of America was opposed to health care reform. Instead of reporting what the polls were certain of — that the American public was confused about this truly complex piece of legislation — the media focused on what polls weren’t sure of — where the American public stood on the merits of the legislation.

The reason for this choice was obvious. A headline proclaiming “Americans Divided on Health Care Reform” gets the public’s attention. The headline “Americans Confused on Health Care Reform” gets… well, a stifled yawn at best.

Unfortunately, the former is an illusion and the latter the reality.

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Polls, Privacy and Security: a Betrayal of Public Trust

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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How were millions of Americans recently persuaded to accept outrageously invasive body searches at airports while voicing the most muted of protests? I mean we’re talking about the land of the free, the home of John Wayne, where citizens covet the right to bear arms in case their government steps out of line. Well it did, but all that was heard was a whimper. In what follows we examine the social forces that molded the attitudes of Americans to accept these invasive protocols and in particular the roles played by the government (Transportation Security Administration), the media, and public opinion polls.

TSA, the media and polling

When the TSA first came out with the “enhanced” security procedures that included genital pat downs and naked full body x-ray scans, the general public reaction was a feeling that on an instinctive emotional level, people’s privacy was being violated. In its efforts to ensure airport security, the government had clearly crossed the line and invaded people’s private space. Since recent polls have shown that Americans don’t have much trust in their government (only 36% said they trust Congress) and the TSA is on organ of government, most Americans would have greeted these TSA-inspired security procedures with a healthy dose of skepticism.

However, at the same time major media were carrying stories based on a CBS poll showing that 81% of Americans agreed that these security measures were acceptable to the American public, and that the intrusion into one’s private space was a reasonable trade-off against terrorist attacks.  The media blitz included our most trusted and influential television networks like CBS, CNN and ABC and highly regarded newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times.

This media blitz gave the TSA message trust value that the public could not ignore.

The American mind, as a consequence, was left with a contradictory message. Gut instinct was telling the mind “No” while American society seemed to be saying “Yes”. What were they supposed to believe?  Here things began to get interesting.

Cognitive dissonance

The human mind has a hard time processing and acting on contradictory information. It feels uneasy, uncomfortable.  In fact, social scientists have a name for just that state of mind. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theory most fully developed by Leon Festinger that describes a person’s behavior when prior beliefs are contradicted by new information. A conflicted mind will do what is necessary to reduce the dissonance i.e., change one’s prior beliefs or reject the new information. For example, smokers need to rationalize the idea of living a full and healthy life with the idea that their bad habit will likely lead to a shorter and unhealthy life. So they end up making lame excuses like: not all smokers die of cancer, you have to die of something, etc, and continue puffing away.

The Ben Franklin effect

It’s somewhat ironic that the human mind which is the source of all deceit, fabrications, half-truths, spins, etc., is itself uncomfortable with the prospect of managing contradictory information. Nevertheless that seems to be the observation from numerous laboratory experiments designed to test the theory. The theory has also been extremely useful in explaining seemingly irrational human behavior in a variety of social contexts. And it certainly isn’t a new idea. Ben Franklin described its application in regards to a longtime political enemy that he befriended not by bestowing favors on the man, but by asking to borrow a rare book owned by his enemy. After receiving a note of gratitude from Ben Franklin for the favor, the man treated Franklin with courtesy for the rest of his life.  Why?  As the kind gesture was emotionally incompatible (dissonant) with the belief of Franklin as an enemy, the belief changed. For a long time this was known as the Ben Franklin effect, which today we understand as an application of cognitive dissonance.

But I digress….

Self-Delusion and other consequences

The cognitive dissonance created by the enhanced TSA security procedures are rationalized by many Americans in a similar fashion. In effect they persuade themselves that these procedures are really not that invasive, that it’s worth the trouble in security gained, that the cumulative exposures to x-rays have negligible health effects, etc. These rationalizations are often expressed in news stories involving interviews of people who have just gone through the enhanced screening process. In this way Americans try to conform to what they believe are common social values shared by a majority of their fellow Americans.  Under the onslaught of such self-delusion to resolve the cognitive dissonance, privacy rights are readily sacrificed.

The sad thing is that all this self-delusion was so unnecessary. The cognitive dissonance was critically dependent on media stories citing polling information confirming that a majority of the American public approved of these procedures. However, analyses of these data show that they very likely greatly overstate public support for the enhanced security checks.

One has to ask: How would the public debate over the screenings have followed a different route if public opinion surveys had showed little support for the enhanced TSA screenings? What if the media story was “Polls Show US Public Rejects New Security Screenings”?  One consequence is that there certainly would not have been any cognitive dissonance. Rather than challenging their own gut feelings as to the inappropriateness of these security procedures, the public would have focused on challenging the invasiveness and ultimately the necessity of these procedures. With this new narrative stream, a public debate driven by accurate polling data would undoubtedly have resulted in a more practical and probably safer screening process in which privacy rights of Americans would have been respected and preserved.

It would not have been a victory for the terrorists.

The villains

So who are the villains in this sad little story?

The TSA was callously opportunistic in their use of inaccurate poll data that conveniently supported the enhanced security procedures. As a government agency their job is to do what is best for Americans, not what is best for the TSA. Appreciating the importance of privacy rights to Americans needs to be balanced by appropriate security procedures. This they completely failed to do.

The media was driven by both self-interest as well as a conflict of interest by commissioning polls that produced inaccurate information, and then disseminating this information across the country. This has left Americans with a completely distorted sense of how the country as a whole feels about legitimate privacy concerns and helped to create unnecessary cognitive dissonance among many Americans. There was no disinterested third party (certainly not the pollsters–see below) to advise the media that the polling process was inappropriate. The intent of the polling was to quickly and cheaply create news for publication on the next day.

The pollsters were in the usual conflict of interest situation allowing strategic interests of the media clients to trump the consideration of methodological actions needed to produce accurate data. The latter would have increased the polling costs and required more time for data preparation. Experienced pollsters should know the cost benefit trade-offs of these actions. The responsibility of the pollster is to advise the client on what is necessary methodologically to produce accurate information. This they failed to do.

The victims

And who are the victims?

As usual, it’s we the public. As the unpleasant reality of these enhanced security measures begins to sink in, more recent polls have shown a significant deterioration of support of these measures among the American public. But the genie is out of the bottle. The damage is done. Privacy rights have been lost and it’s always more difficult to regain them than to defend them.

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Polls and Pat Downs: Questionable Results and Misguided Narratives

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Oleh Iwanyshyn
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An ABC news/Washington Post poll recently reported that two of every three Americans (64%) supported the use of full body x-ray scanners. The same poll also found that half of all Americans (50%) said that “enhanced” pat downs were justified for those who refused the x-ray scans or presented suspicious images. For security methods that are so intrusive of a person’s personal privacy, these results are nothing less than astonishing. But astonishing doesn’t necessarily mean accurate. What follows is a more detailed analysis of the ABC poll that strongly suggests the findings are methodologically unsound, and that support for these intrusive procedures may be substantially lower than those reported by the poll.

The most problematic methodological issue is that the results of the ABC poll were based on a telephone survey. The telephone survey is an inadequate methodology to accurately measure public attitudes to the new security methods. Why? Because the methodology does not deliver sufficient information to respondents for them to make meaningful and informed responses about the nature of these intrusive procedures.

Below is the precise wording for the two questions used in the ABC poll (produced by Langer Research Associates) that provided the information to respondents about the security procedures:

Full body x-ray scan question

“The Transportation Security Administration is increasing its use of so-called ‘full-body’ digital x-ray machines to screen passengers in airport security lines. (Supporters say these machines improve the ability to spot hidden weapons and explosives, and reduce the need for physical searches.) (Opponents say these machines invade privacy by producing x-ray images of a passenger’s naked body that security officials can see, and don’t provide enough added security to justify this.) Which comes closer to your own view – do you support or oppose using these scanners in airport security lines?”

Pat down question

“The TSA says it will hand-search people who don’t want to be screened electronically, as well as those whose electronic screening raises a question. A TSA screener of the same sex as the passenger checks for hidden objects by placing his or her palms and fingers on the passenger’s body, including sensitive areas such as the groin and breast. This replaces earlier hand-screening in which sensitive areas were touched only with the back of the hand. Do you think these new hand pat-procedures (are justified to try to prevent terrorism), or do you think they (go too far in invading personal privacy)?”

Imagining the Abstract versus the Experience

Note that the questions about these security methods were decidedly abstract. They described the pros and cons of each method but offered little insight as to how each method invaded your privacy. While stating the x-ray images revealed images of “a passenger’s naked body”, respondents were NOT shown examples of scans showing detailed images of a man’s genitalia or a woman’s breasts. With respect to the pat downs, respondents were left to imagine what it would feel like for a stranger to place “his or her palms and fingers on the passenger’s body, including sensitive areas such as the groin and breast.” I suggest that imagining a stranger groping you in your private areas and actually experiencing it would elicit very different reactions in most people. The abstract nature of the telephone survey methodology that cannot include the powerful visual imagery of x-ray scans and the physical discomfort and embarrassment of being groped by a stranger (possibly in public) simply does not lend itself to measuring the true attitudes of the public to these invasive security measures.

Interestingly, the ABC poll itself suggests that the experience of these invasive procedures may be central in influencing the public to reject them. The poll found that among those who had flown at least once this year (and therefore possibly had some experience with an invasive security procedure), support for full body x-ray scans dropped to 58 % compared to 70 % for those who had not flown in the past year. More frequent fliers expressed even more resistance to the x-ray scans. These results, together with a comparison with an earlier CBS poll showing that support for full body scanners slipped from 81% to 64%, shows a substantial growth in the public’s resistance to this invasive procedure.

A better methodology

If the telephone survey is not an appropriate methodology to accurately measure how the public feels about these invasive procedures, then what is? Perhaps in this instance we should go back to the traditional household survey involving a face to face interview. In a household survey the interviewer can show the respondent how a typical x-ray scan would reveal the details of a person’s private parts, and then ask the question of whether the respondent would object are not object to this method being used on them. In the pat down question, if the respondent were more venturesome and wanted to know what was involved in the pat down, the interviewer could be trained to demonstrate this. At this stage a male respondent would, for example, learn of the need to manipulate his genitalia sufficiently to determine that nothing feels like possible bomb material in that area. Of course, if the respondent felt uncomfortable with this prospect, he could simply answer the question without going through the demonstration. I can guarantee you that the results of a survey that demonstrates the security procedures in a real “hands on” way would be profoundly different from what was measured by the ABC telephone poll.

So why didn’t ABC use a more appropriate methodology befitting the issue being studied? Two reasons come to mind. The primary reason is that they’re much more costly than telephone surveys. They also have a much longer turnaround. A telephone survey can be turned around for a broadcaster or newspaper overnight and on the following day deliver the results on air or in print. This simply cannot be managed with a person-to-person in-house survey. In effect, accuracy of results for public attitudes to the new security screening methods was sacrificed for financial and temporal expediency of the survey client.

Misguided narratives

The importance of getting an accurate picture of public opinion about these invasive procedures is not just a virtue unto itself. Accurate poll information is critical in influencing the social and political narrative about national security, the role of the TSA and how the public is served by its government.

For example, taking the ABC polls on face value creates a narrative where a large number of Americans genuinely believe the TSA warnings about a terrorist threat and are willing to sacrifice their privacy rights in exchange for greater air safety i.e., fear trumps rights. The fly in the ointment here is the abundant polling evidence that America’s trust in their government is very low. A recent CNN poll reported that “only 26 percent of the public trusts the federal government most of the time or always.” If that is true, it doesn’t really follow that a majority of Americans would place their trust (resulting in significant loss of privacy rights) in the TSA, an organ of the federal government.

The contrarian narrative is rather more interesting. Critics claim that the TSA has led the charge on behalf of the American government to create a fear of terrorism among its citizens that belies the reality. It has been said that if Al Qaeda was as well-organized as the government claims, it would have mounted a number of devastating attacks across the heartland of America since 9/11. That has not happened. Why is not entirely clear. The TSA and other spy agencies of course claim it has been their antiterrorist efforts that have kept the terrorists at bay. That’s not easy to prove, nor disprove. It’s worth noting here that notable terror attempts like the failed shoe bomber, the failed underwear bomber, and the failed Times Square car bomber were derailed by a vigilant public and not any government group. In fact, it’s almost scary how reactive the TSA was during these crises. New TSA screening procedures seem to follow on the heels of the latest terrorist bomb innovation. Aren’t they supposed to be a step ahead of these people?  And what happens when a terrorist decides to hide a bomb in their anal or vaginal cavity? Will air travelers be required to undergo cavity probes with technology that convenient polls will show is enthusiastically supported by a majority of Americans? When the dominant narrative theme is a fearful public, privacy rights seem to fly out the window.

The inaccurate perception of a fearful American public and a TSA security policy that targets all Americans as potential terrorists have created a hugely expensive security program involving a massive bureaucracy and a security industry that is making money hand over fist… and no real evidence that any of this is really working.

Accurate polling information about how Americans really feel about these intrusive methods would fundamentally change the nature of these narratives. Accurate data showing strong resistance from a majority of Americans to these methods would clearly demonstrate that their decision-making is not driven by fear. Privacy rights are part and parcel of what it means to be American. Yet Americans are a commonsensical people. They understand and are willing to accept some infringement of their privacy rights to improve aircraft security. There is, however, a limit beyond which the reduction of privacy rights would constitute a de facto victory by the 9/11 terrorists. The latest TSA screening initiatives may have crossed that line.

We’ll know when we get some accurate polling data on the subject.

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