Espero este reportaje aclare la discrepancia entre las encuestas de
opinion popular que tanto usa la media en USA y las encuestas que a
diario toman en sus web pages CNN, Fox, ABC y MSNBC donde se encuentran
resultados totalmente opuestos.
Saludos,
Dario
Clinton doing well in opinion polls, but voter surveys tell a different
story
Sept. 14 � Depending on what the polls say, an American presidency is
about to end or survive. Approval ratings will shape news media
coverage of the Clinton scandal; how the public perceives the event;
whether and how aggressively Democrats stand by their president; whether
and how aggressively Republicans insist on impeachment.
INDEED, NOW that Bill Clinton�s fate is officially a political matter
and not a legal one, polls are the coin of the realm.
But virtually none of the various poll results in newspapers, on
television or quoted online are regarded seriously by members of
Congress, who will be making these monumental decisions. The politicians
are relying on polls, but not the ones you are seeing.
How can you impeach a president with a 66 percent approval rating?
Here�s how: members of Congress, especially Democrats, are chiefly
concerned with one issue � the impact of this political earthquake on
their party and its 1998 candidates. The most compelling question in
each lawmaker�s mind is figuring out which position will help or hurt
most on election day: defense of the president or the abandonment of
him?
ONLY VOTERS COUNT
There is only one group that can meaningfully answer that question and
it isn�t just the American people. A political fact of life is that the
opinions politicians are concerned with are the American people who
vote. It is another fact of life that only half of all Americans
eligible to vote actually do so. And those of us who do vote have
markedly different (and fundamentally more conservative) attitudes than
those who do not.
As a result, the only public opinion polls that are going to genuinely
influence this process are those that measure the attitudes of the
people who are actually casting votes. These are not the polls you read
about in the media. The only polls to genuinely influence this process
are those that measure attitudes of people who are actually casting
votes.
The oft-quoted public opinion polls are essentially insignificant
samplings of the opinions of "randomly selected adults" or, perhaps even
"registered voters." Fully half of these people are not voters. What�s
more, these polls create a profile of the voting public that is a
politically correct fantasy: each racial and ethnic group represented in
exact proportion to their percentage of the population � even though
they have never voted in that volume.
There are, however, accurate polls. Actual participants in election day
(known in the trade as "high-propensity likely voters") can be found
through expensive and time-consuming professional screening techniques,
which eliminate the ineligible and identify the actual voters. These
polls � privately commissioned by political parties or aspirants and
conducted by such firms as Zogby International � screen out all but
actual voters, asking opinions of people who have voted in perhaps 10 of
the last 11 elections. As a result, these high-priced and nearly always
unpublished polls predict with great accuracy what will happen on
election day. And that, not popular sentiment, is what politicians want
and need to know
CLINTON�S NOT FARING WELL
And guess what? In the real-voter polls I have seen, Clinton is doing
double-digits lower across the board than in the media polls. Care for a
brand new sampling of real voters� opinions? Here are data from the very
latest Zogby poll:
Overall impression of Clinton: Favorable, 46 percent; Unfavorable, 51
percent.
Proud/Ashamed Clinton is President: Proud, 31 percent; Ashamed, 50
percent.
Clinton as Role Model: Positive, 22 percent; Negative, 65 percent.
If Clinton lied to grand jury, he should leave office: Agree, 57
percent.
If Clinton encouraged others to lie, he should leave office: Agree, 60
percent.
We can conclude from this that a major portion of the president�s
support right now is coming from people who don�t vote. This explains
why Democrats are so worried about the Clinton factor, even though he
seems to be doing so well in the opinion polls you�re hearing about in
the media. So public opinion polls are interesting, and they do give a
reading of a type of popular opinion. But public opinion is not what
drives politics or politicians. Voters do. Which raises this
significant question: are the news media merely ignorant of the fact
their polls present a frankly inaccurate (and unrealistically pro-
Clinton) picture of voters� opinions? Are they knowing counterfeiters?
Or is it a legitimate (and not entirely unreasonable) argument that the
president appears to have the support of two out of three citizens �
whether they vote or not? Bogus polls aren�t a crime but, in historic
circumstances such as these, neither are they exactly a public service.
Caveat emptor.
