| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty October 9, 2013 Apparently No One's Really Persuaded by PPP's Latest Survey So, how worried should Republicans be about losing the House? A PPP poll suggested they should, surveying GOP districts, asking a series of questions prefaced with the claim that the incumbent House Republican is responsible for the shutdown, and finding (surprise!) those incumbents in bad shape against generic Democrats. The Huffington Post's Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy: Obama's biggest scandal yet?
Reports are leaking out in Federal documents, on what could be the biggest scandal in Barack Obama's entire presidency.
Will this ruin the President? Will it dramatically change America? One wealthy Maryland citizen says it's definitely possible. Check out his full analysis, free of charge, here … | | The drop in congressional approval measured by Gallup will likely lead to drops in the "reelect" numbers for incumbent Republicans. However, skepticism is in order for the MoveOn/PPP results mostly because they were conducted by a Democratic pollster and sponsored by a liberal advocacy group. Our analyses have shown that polls with partisan sponsorship typically exhibit a bias of 3 to 4 percentage points in favor of their sponsor on vote preference questions. Frequent PPP critic Nate Cohn noted on Monday that the "generic" question (which pits incumbents against an unnamed challenger) overlooks the importance of viable challengers: "Democrats aren't yet poised to mount serious challenges to a clear majority of the Republicans running on competitive turf, let alone actually win. So you should probably take this morning's PPP poll with an additional grain of salt: it's about how House Republicans would fare against a 'generic' Democrat, not the mediocre one they'll face in 2014." Stuart Rothenberg just rips PPP to shreds: PPP isn't your typical polling firm. Its surveys often are intended to boost Democratic recruiting, fundraising or prospects. In this case, the "polls" were almost certainly commissioned to create a narrative about the political repercussions of the shutdown and the nature of the midterms. It's no coincidence, then, that the PPP memo accompanying the results, written by Jim Williams, observes, "The surveys challenge the conventional wisdom that gerrymandering has put the House out of reach for Democrats." Not surprisingly, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out multiple fundraising emails in the hours after reports of the PPP polls surfaced, and dozens of Democratic candidates and liberal groups did the same. That's the standard modus operandi these days on both the right and the left: have a sympathetic media organization or polling firm assert some alleged finding, and then have fellow travelers cite the initial report to try to raise cash or create momentum. It is becoming (yawn — excuse me) a little trite. Rothenberg continues: Of course, the "polls" did not include head-to-head ballot tests of likely nominees (even though the surveys could have included candidate names in many contests), but instead relied on a messy question that was part "re-elect" and part "generic ballot." The results are of little or no use because that is not the choice voters will face on Election Day. Moreover, at least five of the 17 Republicans who are "losing" either have no serious opposition or have less-than-top-tier opponents at this point: Steve King (Iowa's 4th District), Andy Barr (Kentucky's 6th), Kerry Bentivolio (Michigan's 11th), Patrick Meehan (Pennsylvania's 7th) and Sean P. Duffy (Wisconsin's 7th). Bentivolio may not survive a GOP primary. Each PPP survey asked seven substantive questions and four demographic ones. Some of the questions were loaded, and as I have noted previously in dissecting PPP polls, the "more likely/less likely" question is a horrible one to use in surveys because it tends to measure the underlying attitude rather than gather useful information about an issue's eventual importance as a vote cue. Even a writer at Daily Kos had to note: Informed ballots such as these, though, must always be viewed with caution. They represent an ideal environment where one side is able to widely disseminate its preferred message, without pushback or interference from the other side. In other words, a scenario nothing like what you encounter in the real world. That said, though, these polls show that hammering Republicans over the shutdown has the potential to be effective across a very diverse array of districts. And while 3 points might not sound like a lot, seven Republicans and nine Democrats won House races by less than that amount in 2012. It's also worth noting that, like informed ballots, polling against generic candidates represents a sort of idealized situation as well. In some races, Democrats may not land serious challengers; in others, Democratic candidates may stumble or fail to gain traction. On the flipside, sometimes an actual candidate will perform better than a generic unnamed option because of their strong personal attributes. Early on, when you're more than a year out from Election Day, generic ballots can serve as a helpful metric, but reality will ultimately diverge in most cases. Keep in mind, a majority party in the House is going to face some dangers when the country is angry at Washington and there is a slow economy. An Entitlement Reform Path Out of the Current Mess? Paul Ryan floats a bargain to get out of the current stalemate in the Wall Street Journal: If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs. One big hitch: Obama thinks he's winning the shutdown now, and figures at some point, House Republicans will fold and pass both a clean CR to fund the government and a hike in the debt ceiling. Is he really going to end the current state of play by signing on to potentially painful, potentially controversial entitlement reform? Is the American Public Too 'Tuned Out' for Our Current Arguments? Conservatives believe, with some evidence, that the reason people disagree with them is because those people are uniformed or misinformed. Katherine Rodriguez: [Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau] said the reason most people oppose the Affordable Care Act is because people are "susceptible to billions of dollars of advertising telling them Obama's going to take away their health care and a weird Uncle Sam with tweezers is going to inspect you." . . . Fifty-five percent of Americans who say they are most likely to disapprove of the law are also the ones who know the most about it, according to Gallup. The poll also said that one-in-three young Americans from age 18-34 are least familiar with but most optimistic about the law. Derek Dye, the executive director for the Doctor Patient Medical Association, argued that Favreau's sentiment is backward because the public mostly identified Obamacare as the talking points that helped create support for the law. "Obamacare is much more complex than those talking points make it sound, and as people learn more about the law public opinion has only gone down," said Dye, 25. I was reminded of Favreau's recent comment after reading Jack Shafer's book review of Ilya Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance: "The sheer depth of most individual voters' ignorance may be shocking to readers not familiar with the research," Somin writes on his first page. Many Americans don't know how the government works, they don't know much about who runs the government, and they're clueless about how government programs work. For instance, a 2006 Zogby poll reported that only 42 percent of respondees could name the three branches of government. In another survey from that year, only 28 percent could name two or more of the five rights in the First Amendment, and a 2002 study indicated that 35 percent believed that the words "From each according to his ability to each according to his need" could be found in the Constitution. CNN found in its 2011 poll that Americans estimated on average that foreign aid consumes 10 percent of the federal budget when it actually takes up less than 1 percent. None of the alternatives impress Somin, who brings his book to a close by suggesting that if the American people don't know anything about their government and they don't want to know anything about it — that if they're not interested in monitoring and tending the colossus they've built — then maybe it shouldn't exist on the scale that it does. He doesn't put it in exactly those terms, but he does hold that downsizing and decentralizing the federal government would reduce the labor required to keep informed and thereby reducing voter ignorance. Elsewhere in the review, it's clear the public isn't growing more informed over time: When the Pew Research Center study compared the political knowledge of 1989 respondents with those from 2007 it found the advent of multiple 24-hour news channels, the C-SPAN channels, and hundreds of news sites on the Web had not moved the political ignorance dial in any appreciable way. Nor have massive rises in education over the past half-century put a dent in political ignorance, Somin finds. "On an education-adjusted basis, political knowledge may actually have declined, with 1990s college graduates having knowledge levels comparable to those of high school graduates in the 1940s," he writes, even though IQ scores have been rising. I'll bet a lot of the politically "tuned in" Americans think the "tuned out" Americans' overall judgment -- well beyond the political sphere -- is eroding, as well. We've seen our fellow countrymen buying houses they can't afford. We've seen them go deeply into debt to get a college education, and then major in a field with extremely limited earning and career prospects. We've seen young men (and not just young men) create a child and then refuse to take care of those children. We don't take care of our health. We don't save for the future. We drink, gamble, take drugs, sleep around. Yes, we've always had folks with bad judgment. But societies are built by groups who make good decisions, bad decisions, and a mix of both. If we have too many folks making bad decisions, our problems worsen. You'll forgive me for linking to Matt Yglesias, as he describes a bit of social science research suggesting that poverty and bad judgment feed upon each other in a cycle: A study published last week in the journal Science shows that the stress of worrying about finances can impair cognitive functions in a meaningful way. The authors gathered evidence from both low-income Americans (at a New Jersey shopping mall) and the global poor (looking at farmers in Tamil Nadu, India) and found that just contemplating a projected financial decision impacted performance on spatial and reasoning tests. Among Americans, they found that low-income people asked to ponder an expensive car repair did worse on cognitive-function tests than low-income people asked to consider cheaper repairs or than higher-income people faced with either scenario. To study the global poor, the researchers looked at performance on cognitive tests before and after the harvest among sugarcane farmers. Since it's a cash crop rather than a food one, the harvest signals a change in financial security but not a nutritional one. They found that the more secure postharvest farmers performed better than the more anxious preharvest ones. ADDENDUM: I'll be on the panel for Chuck Todd's Daily Rundown at the 10 a.m. hour this morning. Editor's Note:
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