How To Understand The Public

By now most of you probably heard about the "disaster" at the Daily Kos. It turns out their polling company, Research 2000, has been faking their polling data. **snicker snicker** This has, of course, called into question the validity of all the “analysis” they’ve done over the past. . . well, forever. But their loss is our indifference because liberals believing wrong things is as normal a part of life as breathing. But that raises the question, how do we know what the public is really thinking?

The most obvious answer remains polls: polls can be accurate enough to give you a fair impression of the public’s mood. However, we must always remember that polls suffer from serious limitations. For example, polling relies on obtaining a representative sample. That means they need to poll a large enough group to be able to make certain statistical assumptions, and that group must match the broader population.

And that’s really where the first problems appear. How many Democrats should you include in a poll? How many Republicans? Can you be sure that your independents represent actual independents? It is the answers to these questions that cause poll results to vary so much, even if they all used the same questions. But that’s yet another problem: they don’t ask the same questions, and depending on how the questions are phrases, which words are used, and even the available answers, it is possible to manipulate a poll to such a degree that it no longer represents the public.

But there’s another aspect to polling that needs to be considered: the lack of commitment or intensity. And by this, I mean that people will say things but won’t really mean them. The best example of this comes from environmental polls. “Should we try to stop global warming?” A large percentage of people will answer “yes” to this. So we all believe in global warming and we support cap and trade right? Not quite. When they asked “are you willing to spend $100 a year to stop global warming,” the “yes” numbers crashed. By the same token, if you ask “which of the following candidates would you support in 2012?” and then you list ten candidates, it’s possible that all ten candidates will score 90% approval ratings. But does that actually tell us anything? It really doesn’t because there is no ability to distinguish the intensity or the level of commitment.

The same applies in other areas as well: “Are you so angry at Hollywood that you intend to boycott all future movies?” A sizeable percentage of people will answer “yes” to this. But there’s no way to tell if they are serious. In fact, this question is a very easy way to voice displeasure without undertaking the commitment of following through.

So how do we really know what the public is thinking? You follow behavior and you look for patterns in it. For example, the public says they love candidate X, but is anyone giving them time or money? Are they drawing a disproportionately larger share of money or volunteers than other campaigns? Do they draw larger crowds at events?

It’s the same thing with movies. You see a series of trade publications giving all kinds of awards to actor Y. He’s voted the sexiest man alive, and is cast in dozens of films. The headlines scream -- “everybody loves Y.” But do the box office figures concur? Whether or not people will spend money to see him is what counts. A recent example that demonstrates the importance of following the money is the movie Snakes on a Plane. This turdburger was hyped all over the internet and easily won the “most clicks” war for several weeks before the film came out. But clicks are free, admission isn’t. The movie tanked. Once again, there was a difference between what people said (clicks) and what they did (pay for a ticket).

When I write articles about the public accepting one thing or rejecting another, these are the things I look for. Did the movie make money? Can the movie star sell tickets? Does candidate X actually engender monetary support or just “clicks.” Does the public actually support the actual regulations that will affect them, or just the principle of a happier world?

You can even use anecdotal evidence if you are careful about it. What you need to look for are inconsistencies. For example, the fact that your neighbor complains about Obama means nothing. If they’re conservative, then this is to be expected. If they’re liberal, then it could just be blowing off steam. But a non-political neighbor who expresses anger at something they wouldn’t normally know anything about, can be informative. It can tell you, for example, that what Obama has done has drifted down into the public consciousness and not in a good way. That’s how it first became obvious that the BP spill was a problem for Obama -- people who don’t pay attention to politics were suddenly talking about his response.

Moreover, you can look at how the left reacts. For example, the more shrill the denials that a particular event has any meaning, the greater the likelihood that it actually has struck a chord and they are worried. This is what confirmed that the public was upset about the BP spill, because leftists were falling all over themselves to write articles telling us that no one cared.

This is also how I can tell you that financial reform means nothing to the public. First, note the lack of articles about financial reform. That’s because journalists aren’t going to write about something the public doesn’t care about. Secondly, note that when we write about it, the numbers of comments drop dramatically and the comments themselves become very short. This isn’t a lack of brainpower on the part of readers, it’s a lack of interest. Add in the falling ratings of the business news channels and the disappearance of business news from newspapers and nightly news shows, and what you get is the public voting with their feet, i.e. they are changing the channel because they don’t care.

Further, you can often derive fascinating information about the public from the strangest sources. Indeed, one of the most brilliant strategists the Republicans ever had, the late Lee Atwater, once said that he would read the National Enquirer every day. The reason was that this newspaper of made up news told him what the American public was thinking about.

Examples of the kinds of things I’m talking about here could include (1) the lack of success of energy efficient products, which indicates that consumers aren’t willing to substitute environmentalism for quality; (2) the lack of success of recent Megan Fox films, which could signal public anger at her insulting political statements; (3) surges in gun sales and security systems in certain areas, which indicate a loss of confidence in the local police; or (4) consumer spending going down even as consumer confidence polls are going up.

And you can also get to what the public really values in this way. For example, a few months back, there was an interesting tidbit from Netflix. People keep serious movies significantly longer than the mindless stuff. The reason, it turns out, is that people rent the serious stuff because “they should,” but then never want to watch it. In fact, many of these films are kept for several weeks before being returned unwatched. What does this tell us? It tells us that despite protestations that the public likes “deep” and “serious” entertainment, it actually prefers the mindless stuff. How is that useful knowledge? Well, it helps you understand the psyche of the public -- the public has an idea of what they should be like, but they don’t live up to that. So if you are planning a political campaign, this tells you not to make it hard on them. This also tells us to remember that the public may over-idealize itself in response to polls.

There are millions of more examples, but this should give you a sense of the kinds of places you can look to see what the public really believes. Polls are nice, but it’s actions that matter. And within actions, there are patterns and motivations.

To understand the public, consider the old saying turned around: “do as I do, not as I say.”