And They Wonder Why People Don’t Take Polls Seriously

By Jason Kenney | Saturday, March 5th, 2011 | Policy

This was a week of polls for Virginia. Sure Public Policy Polling came out with what appears to be a huge boost to George Allen’s bid for Senate but then they followed up with a Virginia Politician Report Card poll that, well, doesn’t seem to know who it’s polling:

New Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has a 46-34 job approval margin less than two months into his term, putting him just above the middle of the pack of 41 governors on which PPP has polled in the last 14 months or so.

You know, Governor McDonnell. Who was elected in 2009 and seems to have had a subsequent 14 month lame duck before finally getting his chance to start his term two months ago.

Kinda hard to take a poll seriously when it starts out with a glaring error like that.

But the week wasn’t done with its wacky polls. Nope, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (which can’t possibly have a short membership list because, really, Mayors For Illegal Guns have had trouble fundraising for years!) released a poll that supposedly showed nearly 90% of Virginians supporting a list of gun control laws.

•84 percent of Virginians support requiring gun dealers to notify police when someone fails a background check.
•88 percent of Virginians support a law to require background checks for all guns sold at gun shows.
•85 percent of Virginians support tracking the bulk purchase of semi-automatic assault rifles.

You can’t get 90% of people to agree on the color of the sky let alone a poll question. Unless you happen to hire a partisan firm to help spin the question the right way for ya. (*SIDE NOTE: Has Hart Research EVER polled Virginia for anything in the past? I can’t find anything but I could be overlooking it…)

Let’s look at the numbers (not the methodology, tho, they haven’t given us that):

• The survey was conducted among 600 respondents.
• 54% of whom were over the age of 50. Virginia’s population’s media age is only about 34.
• Virginian’s have a -1% approval on GOPs in Congress, -4% for Democrats. To read this, you’d think we’re all drinking the Tea Party tea. This also gives Virginia the lowest approval rating for either party in Congress among the five states polled: no other state had a negative approval for either party.
• Warner holds a 62/19 favorable rating, which compares to a 58/29 rating in the PPP poll I dismissed because they don’t know how long our Governor’s been in office.
• 38% gun owning households
• When asked “In general, do you feel the laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now?”, 55% said more strict, 35% same, 5% less. Virginia polled higher than any other state for want of general strictiness. Among gun owning households, these numbers were 42% more, 46% same, 9% less.
• When asked the very scientific and open ended “hey, what could we do to prevent mass shootings?”, 47% responded with what
  

  could be described as any of the following: “stricter gun laws,” “more extensive background checks,” “ban guns/bullets,” “restrict sale of semi-automatic/automatic handguns” and “better enforcement of existing gun laws”

  17% said “better mental health support” 14% said “dk/ref” and 13% said “other”.

• Here’s a big one: When asked about Virginia’s laws in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, 4% said laws have tightened too much, 34% said just enough, 38% said not enough and 24% said they were not sure.

And then you get to the “do you favor or oppose a law doing this?”, which is where you get the real spin and fantastic numbers. You can ask people how much they favor Free Pizza Friday, that doesn’t mean they’re going to want a law passed for it (I, for one, do).

“Yeah, that sounds alright,” is a common answer on these things.

Keeping guns out of the hands of people on the terror watch list? Sure, we can do that.

Reporting criminals who try to buy guns? Yeah, absolutely.

Track bulk purchases of assault weapons? Well, if you’re talking about criminals and terrorists getting them, hells yeah!

Nevermind that the three are unrelated. We’ll just rapid fire these questions and make sure we get the results we want.

Seriously, are we dealing with a group of Mayors Against Illegal Guns or Mayors Who Want To Make Guns Illegal? Because this isn’t about stopping illegal guns. It’s about trying to change the laws by fudging public support numbers.

But maybe they’re hoping to take advantage of our new Governor who’s still getting his feet wet. What, only having been governor for two months now and all.

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