The Center for Competitive Politics released a poll today focusing on issues in the DISCLOSE Act, which the Senate may take up again as soon as next week. We’ve issued a press release analyzing the results in detail, the poll questions and crosstabs.
The Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen and The Washington Independent’s Jesse Zwick were kind enough to mention our poll, and they both raise issues that merit a response.
First, the polling company, Pulse Opinion Research, has raised a couple of questions. They’re open about licensing the methodology developed by Scott Rasmussen. Hasen links to a pretty pejorative piece by the DailyKos, which describes Pulse as the company behind “the FOX Nutwork’s new polls” by “Rightwinger Scott Rasmussen.”
The Huffington Post has a much more balanced story on Pulse, noting that Rasmussen has polled more often than U.S. Senate races than any other firm, among other factoids. In fact, they represent nearly half of all polls for U.S. Senate seats. Some have criticized Rasmussen’s methodology, but to suggest it’s illegitimate seems wrong.
Ultimately, though, there’s an apples-to-oranges comparison problem: Rasmussen doesn’t do commissioned polling, but it licenses its methodology to Pulse. Nonetheless, it’s nearly impossible to compare the accuracy of the political polling on elections to issue surveys. Even so, I recall Nate Silver’s www.fivethirtyeight.com rated Rasmussen (and, one would assume, the model) as one of the most accurate pollsters [At the moment the images with the rankings are down]. Rasmussen cites several metrics, such as its track record in the 2004 and 2008 elections, to tout its accuracy.
Second, I’m not sure where the $600 figure that Hasen cites comes from or what the relevance is that relatively anyone may commission such a poll. I wasn’t aware that it was uncommon for polling companies to allow people to commission polls. Is there anything even remotely controversial about that? For the record, as anyone who looks at Pulse’s website could find, a national, ten question survey of 1,000 respondents (as we conducted) costs at least $3,500.
Indeed, CCP’s poll is an automated poll, but it’s not entirely clear why that’s problematic. Last week Hasen also referred to the Voter Roll Call survey conducted for MoveOn.org as interesting but didn’t question the credibility of the pollster, which also uses an automated methodology. One also assumes that most groups, such as MoveOn.org, could commission such a poll using their own wording for a fee. Again, I’m at a loss as to why this is an issue.
Third, we have publicly released every question we asked, every set of responses and even the poll crosstabs.
In a forthcoming op-ed in the Washington Examiner, we also address the issue of framing and word choice in the poll questions:
Unlike many campaign finance polls issued by self-styled reform groups, we intentionally used neutral language and avoided playing up the virtues of the First Amendment or bemoaning political corruption.
In January, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that companies, unions and advocacy groups have a First Amendment right to advocate for or against the election of federal candidates.
An August poll by Voter Roll Call Surveys conducted for MoveOn.org asked, “Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that corporations can spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. Do you agree? Disagree? Or have no opinion on this decision?”
We asked whether respondents agreed with this statement: “Businesses, unions, and interest groups should be free to spend money asking voters to elect or defeat candidates for public office.”
We think it’s pretty clear which question attempts to skew the response and which question attempts to accurately describe the state of the law after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United to elicit an accurate response.
The most-cited poll on Citizens United—a February survey by ABC News and The Washington Post—has similar framing problems. That poll asked whether respondents “support or oppose the recent ruling by the Supreme Court that says corporations and unions can spend as much money as they want to help political candidates win elections?” At least this poll doesn’t single out corporations, but it still implies they could use limitless resources to directly aid candidates-yet the decision only allows uncoordinated, independent spending.
Partisans have been crowing for months that Congress needs to pass the DISCLOSE Act because this poll shows 80 percent of Americans opposed to the Supreme Court’s ruling. But contrary to claims of a public backlash by “reform” groups, we found only 48 percent of respondents disagreed that businesses and unions should be able to spend. Moreover, the intensity of that plurality opposition is low—only 27 percent of respondents strongly disagree with the ability of companies and unions to spend money on politics.
Fourth, Zwick raised some issues regarding whether our poll actually shows a lack of support for the DISCLOSE Act, citing the mixed results in the responses to questions on the disclosure issues.
But our observation that DISCLOSE doesn’t enjoy the support many “reform” groups claim is not based mainly on the disclosure questions; it’s based on the response showing that 56 percent of likely voters think interest groups should be free to spend money on politics. This contrasts with The Washington Post poll and others showing large majorities opposed to Citizens United when using wording about corporations or corruption. Zwick’s post does not address this issue, which is still a huge part of DISCLOSE. Despite The Hill’s recent report that Sen. Schumer is considering stripping the non-disclosure provisions, they still remain. We’ve heard of no outreach whatsoever on these issues to moderate Republicans.
Our assertion isn’t that people oppose disclosure outright and overwhelmingly, it’s that they’re more skeptical than commonly believed. Accordingly, this goes to the point that there’s not overwhelming support for the DISCLOSE provisions, not that the public is uniformly opposed to them. As noted by both Hasen and Zwick, if we were trying to skew the results, we wouldn’t have even released question 10, which shows that Americans support some level of informational disclosure.
An addendum from the Chairman (6:00 p.m. September 16): We find the response to the poll we commissioned interesting, and I think validating. One of the first responses was a series of ad hominem attacks on the pollster, to the point that an in email shared on the Election Law Listserve, Nate Silver disavowed his own pollster ratings (Rasmussen, he suggested, is apparently accurate but biased; other pollsters now putting into place Rasmussen-type voter screens are starting to get results closer to his -I’m not quite sure how this is a criticism of Rasmussen; and, for reasons not disclosed, he certainly wouldn’t trust them on policy polling, even though that type of thing is where Rasmussen does most its business. OK.)
The New Republic’s Jesse Zwick was up in moments (now that’s a good blogger!), this time at the Washington Independent, to assure one and all that all was well, everyone still supports DISCLOSE. Except the problem with rapid blogging is that you read things rapidly, and can miss a lot. Jesse apparently missed the large majorities opposed to the favorable treatment of unions in the bill and the solid majority that supports allowing interest groups to spend on campaigns; and when we point out that a two thirds majority believes current reporting thresholds for PACs, political committees, and independent expenditures are far too low, he accuses us of dishonestly suggesting that that means no support for DISCLOSE, even though our press release notes very clearly: “The higher reporting thresholds included in the DISCLOSE Act enjoyed more support,…” which we go on to describe. And the full results are right there for all to see, although even then, he doesn’t address the fact that a majority oppose the disclosure thresholds in the House-passed version of DISCLOSE. Jesse’s response to our response indicates that like most DISCLOSE supporters, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care (I suspect the former) how the bill works – he seems oblivious to the fact that DISCLOSE, by redefining foreign corporations and government contractors in ways that most people wouldn’t recognize, actually bars a great deal of speech that was legal even before the supposed impetus for DISCLOSE, the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. And it never begins to occur to Mr. Zwick (or other DISCLOSE supporters) that those who only “somewhat disagree” with corporate and union spending on campaigns may state that position because they believe that spending by some such entities, or in some amounts, is acceptable or even good. If that is true, the percentage opposed to the absolutist solutions of the regulators may be substantially higher.
We remain optimistic that those not wedded to the ideology of ever increasing regulation will look at the results in a more cool-headed manner. Meanwhile, we plan to continue asking questions that the reformers won’t ask, for those who want to consider the complexity of public opinion in this area.
