The AZ Republic claims, based on a Cronkite-Eight poll, that "a growing number of Arizonans favor stricter gun laws". However, this is also the polling agency that claims widespread voter support for gun control, abortion rights & "putting illegal immigrants on a path toward citizenship"
Those pronouncements strike me as just...well, wrong.
One would assume, with the connection to both ASU and KAET, it is a liberal leaning organization. One could infer from not only the results, but the issues they chose to cite (abortion and immigration in a story about pending gun legislation), that they are left leaning.
But...does anyone actually know anything about Cronkite-Eight , their methods and/or Dr Bruce Merrill?
UPDATE: I dashed off this post last night, and I wasn't very thorough (even for me) I have a feeling the results of these polls are 'cooked'
I wonder for instance if they elicit the preferred answer by the way they phrase the questions (e.g. "Are you in favor of removing all restrictions keeping a person from brandishing a gun in your child's classroom?") or by the demographic they target in the first place (e.g. Going to a Planned Parenthood office to ask about abortion 'rights')
I am not generally a believer in polls, per se, for all the reasons SAJU eloquently mentions in his comment, but I know it is possible for them to be more neutral - and ways to make them more 'useful'. I am wondering whether Cronkite-Eight has a reputation for making results more useful.
I used to work with the marketing database of a large computer company. My boss would say, "We have all the numbers, now we just need to find out what answer they want so we can write the correct query"
UPDATE: Espresso Pundit wrote about this, too.
Posted by Vox at March 12, 2008 10:28 PM | politicsLarge majorities of the public routinely embrace fairly radical ideas (radical for America, anyway) in public opinion surveys. For example, 68 percent of people agree with this statement: "Teachers and other public school officials should be allowed to lead prayers in public school."
When people are asked questions of this sort, they often are considering the issue at this level of specificity for the first time in their lives. Many times, in fact, they're considering the issue for the first time in their lives, PERIOD. Given a question that political sophisticates could debate for hours, and never having given much thought to the issue--and in many cases, lacking the capacity to give the issue any meaningful degree of consideration--they cough up an answer.
No big surprise, then, that even with proper question wording, poll results are often meaningless.
I'm not going to argue that they're always meaningless, or that they're meaningless only when majority opinion differs from my opinion. I am going to say, though, that surveys are very often the wrong instrument for getting a good read on what the public thinks.
Kinda like trying to eat soup with a knife.
Posted by: Special Agent Johnny Utah at March 13, 2008 01:38 AM