Pinning Down Poll Numbers
This poll comes out the day after the Associated Press reported on a Pew poll that found that 49 percent of respondents "correctly answered that Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House." Another data point found that about three-fourths of respondents knew that the Democrats control the House.
The two polls left me wondering: If fewer than half of those polled by Pew even know the identity of the Speaker of the House, what -- if anything -- should we make of peoples' opinions about Congress? To what extent are they responding to what Congress is actually doing, and to what extent are they just sharing a general dissatisfaction with politics in general?
I turned to Kathy Frankovic, Director of Surveys for CBS News, and Mark Blumenthal, otherwise known as the Mystery Pollster, for some answers.
"This probably is more of a general measure of what people think of that institution called Congress," he said. Blumenthal told me that there is a sizable chunk of respondents who are plugged into what's going on and are responding based on that, but that there are also a fair number that are responding based on something far more vague.
One can, he noted, extrapolate larger trends if one looks closely at the data – for example, if liberal Democrats have turned sharply against Congress, you can read something into that. But a headline alone leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Frankovic said that the drop in approval for Congress could probably be traced to the failed immigration bill. "I'd put the blame on the fact that there has been a lot of debate and nothing passed," she said. "It probably isn't policy as much as the perception that they bicker, they debate, and nothing gets done."
"Conflict and controversy in the Congress hurts them," she added. "It's not so much the content of the policy as the perception of Congress as unable to accomplish anything. We've seen this in the past. The public usually reacts negatively to the existence of a debate and lack of accomplishment. We saw it with Terry Schiavo and the impeachment of Bill Clinton."
I asked Blumenthal if pollsters generally ask questions to determine how knowledgeable respondents are about a particular issue. "Not as much as I wish we asked those types of questions," he said.
Frankovic noted that people tend to "jump at the opportunity" to say they don't know enough about a politician to have an opinion. When given that chance to do so for a poll in April about Pelosi, she noted, 49 percent took that option.
"The bottom line is skepticism about this stuff is good," said Blumenthal. "We often look at numbers and tables and see them as omniscient and precise in a way that these kinds of numbers can't be. When you talk to people in person, their opinions can be rich, detailed, and contradictory. They don't translate precisely into the kinds of neat statistics that we love to look at and obsess over."