According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (5/5/23), Americans are about evenly divided on who they would blame—Republicans in Congress or President Biden—“if the debt limit is not raised and the government goes into default.”
The poll is an egregious example of manufacturing rather than measuring public opinion. As it is structured, the poll cannot accurately represent the views of the US public on the debt ceiling. Instead, it reflects the manipulation of opinion that is built into the questionnaire design.
The questionnaire included just two substantive questions on the issue of the debt ceiling:
Q.1 Congress typically passes legislation on a regular basis to pay its debts. Without this step, the government could default on its debt. Do you think Congress should…?
-
- Allow government to pay debts ONLY if Biden agrees to cut spending (26%)
- Issues of debt payment and federal spending should be handled separately (58%)
- No opinion (16%)
Q. 2 If the debt limit is not raised and the government goes into default, who would you mainly blame for that –
-
- Biden (36%)
- Republicans in Congress (39%)
- Both equally (16%)
- Neither (3%)
- No opinion (5%)
Tainting the sample
Washington Post (5/5/23)
Note that the poll did not attempt to measure how many respondents had even heard of the issue before being asked about it in the poll. The journalists clearly understood that the debt ceiling issue is pretty arcane, that relatively few Americans really understand why it exists, and thus haven’t formed a meaningful opinion about it.
Rather than allow the poll to reflect that public lack of engagement, the journalists instead designed questions that would give the opposite impression—an illusion that the vast majority of Americans understand the issue and have an opinion about it.
The pollsters gave their respondents a very brief and biased statement about the debt ceiling, and then immediately asked them to give their opinion—based on what they had just heard.
A national sample of adults in a poll, typically about 1,000 or so respondents, is designed to represent the larger US adult population of about 260 million people. When pollsters provide information to the sample of adults, that group can no long be seen as representative of the larger US population. Why? Because the larger population has not been given exactly the same information as the adults in the sample. The respondents have information, however brief or distorted it might be, that the rest of Americans have not received. It is simply incorrect to generalize findings based on such a tainted sample to the larger population.
Deflecting responsibility
ABC (5/5/23)
Apart from this fatal flaw, the first question in the polls asks what “Congress” should do, when the issue is not “Congress,” but Republicans in Congress. Think how differently the tone would be if the question were:
Do you think the Republicans in Congress should allow government to pay its debts ONLY if Biden accepts cuts in spending, or should they treat the issues of debt and federal spending separately?
Even with the biased wording, the poll showed two-to-one support for treating the issue separately.
Still, the first question set up the conflict as though it were a simple issue of spending cuts (never specified), which of course is not the case. The issue is much more complicated because of the nature of the debt ceiling itself, which does not affect future spending, but only paying back money that the government has already spent.
With the issue simplified to a meaning that distorts what the issue really is about, the second question is a master of manipulation. It asks in a passive voice: “If the debt limit is not raised, who would you blame?”—rather than: “If Republicans in Congress refuse to raise the debt limit, who would you blame?” It’s not “Congress” more widely, it’s the Republicans in the House who are refusing to raise the debt limit. The question implicitly spreads the responsibility, sidestepping the actual point of confrontation.
Ignoring the crucial conflict
Probably the most important conflict in this issue is the actual spending cuts the House Republicans are demanding. If the pollsters had wanted to give respondents information, they could have described the size of the cuts specified in the House bill, as well as a general description of where the cuts would be made—and then asked respondents if they approved of those cuts as a condition for raising the debt ceiling.
Once specific cuts are mentioned, it is highly likely the number of respondents who disapprove of such cuts would be in the majority. Still, even that approach would inevitably be biased, as not all details could be included.
The only way to get a clean read of public opinion is to be sure that pollsters differentiate among respondents who have a meaningful opinion and those who don’t, and to ask objective questions without giving respondents any information about the issue.
The result would likely show that a large segment of the public, possibly even a majority, is—at this time—unengaged on the issue, and would admit they had no opinion. But that’s not the reality the news media want to acknowledge. Apparently, it’s more interesting to create the illusion of a widely informed and engaged public than to acknowledge how little most people really know about the debt ceiling.
The post ABC/WaPo Poll Creates Illusion of Public Opinion on Debt Ceiling appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.
David W. Moore | Radio Free (2023-05-12T19:15:02+00:00) ABC/WaPo Poll Creates Illusion of Public Opinion on Debt Ceiling. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/12/abc-wapo-poll-creates-illusion-of-public-opinion-on-debt-ceiling/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.