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Comment by waffle_ss | Hacker News Reader

To put it bluntly, if you change your opinion on fundamental issues like civil liberties based on who is currently in office, you are an idiot and are part of the problem in this country.

Unfortunately, we seem to have a lot of idiots: http://www.people-press.org/files/2013/06/6-10-13-4.png

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I saw some meta-analysis of those numbers. I think it's useful to extract the "people actually changing their minds" number: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732349560457853...

"The Republican response went from 75% to 23% under George W. Bush to 52% to 47% under Barack Obama. If we assume the swing was entirely partisan--that is, if we exclude the possibility that some Republicans opposed the policy under Bush and favor it now--that means 52% of Republicans are consistent in support and 23% consistent in opposition.

The Democratic response went from 37% to 61% under Bush to 64% to 34% under Obama. Making the same assumption as above, that means 37% of Democrats are consistent in support and 34% consistent in opposition.

Add the figures together and you come up with 75% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats consistent in their positions, which would mean that well under one-third of partisans switched for partisan reasons."

But also, party identification in these polls is self-reported and volatile, so the "Republicans" and "Democracts" aren't even the same people. Some people will just say they're whatever party the President is, if they're generally supportive, or whatever he's not, if they're opposed.

Another factor is that some people, I believe especially more recent immigrants, are suspicious that phone pollsters are not disinterested researchers of anonymous opinion, but rather testing loyalty or trying to identify people to persecute. (That is, are you sure it's really a pollster, and not the NSA/CIA/DHS/DEA/FBI/INS calling?)

Such people might be especially prone to identifying as the same party as, and refusing to complain on record about, "the powerful". This could throw in an extra few percent "Dem/OK-with-NSA" today, and would have thrown in extra "GOP/OK-with-NSA" then.

Its also worth noting, in addition to the point gojomo makes that party identification is self-reported and volatile (and the further, related, point that people both enter and exit the sampled population over time), so that the populations of "Democrats" and "Republicans" in the 2013 poll aren't the same as the population in the 2006 poll, that the questions in the two Pew polls that are the basis of that "metaanalysis" aren't about the same thing.

The 2006 poll question asked about warrantless wiretapping by the NSA (it specified both "listening in on telephone calls" and "without a warrant".)

The 2013 poll questioned asked about asked tracking call information under "secret court orders", which is neither listening in on calls or done without a warrant. They are two different things; it is a mistake to treat them as the same thing and consider different reactions to them as inconsistent.

(Though, given the specific differences, shifting from supporting the former to opposing the latter is something I find odd, but I suppose it could be consistent and not based on pure partisanship if it was grounded, for example, in a strong ideological opposition to the idea of judges overseeing executive national security actions.)

I saw Hannity on Fox news yesterday at a restaurant and he was all up in arms about how this program violated our privacy and the 4th amendment, but after 9/11 the same guy was talking about how we needed these types of programs to protect the U.S. from terrorists.

Fox News and its hypocritical morons are some of the most biased, unmoving, blabbering, illiterate and uneducated right-wing journalists I've ever seen.

Same goes for MSNBC, but just replace right-wing with left-wing.

Fox News is commonly regarded as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party.

MSNBC doesn't seem to have fully earned the complementary title, though it certainly leans that way.

Similarly, if you do not change your opinions as you mature as an individual, and as you receive more information about particular situations and the world in general, then you are 'an idiot and part of the problem in this country'.

I think you have to distinguish between a change in the actual or understood facts vs. only a change in the party controlling the presidency.

Over the course of several years there have been countless new events and new revelations. Literally countless. Every single day every single voter has new experiences in life, gains new perspectives, and hears more of history than they knew before. It is impossible to know what precipitated any individual's change without asking that individual. In absence of that specific knowledge, it is not appropriate to criticize anyone changing their mind, particularly over such a large span of time.

Can a change in administration be the sole cause of such a change in heart? Perhaps, but it is uncharitable (to say the least) to dismiss changes in public sentiment as the product of partisan politics and simple minds. Uncharitable, and unproductive.

If the overwhelming pattern is that the members of a single party change their views on multiple issues in concert, particularly of those shifts involve disavowal of prior views (or even diametric opposition to views previously held), while those of other parties (not just the primary opposing one), or persons outside that political system (e.g., in other countries) don't, and there's an expressed policy of opposing a party or its head, then I think the suspicion that the shift is largely partisan is rather well founded.

There is also 7 years between those polls, so there are a lot more factors than just 'who is currently in office' that may have impacted the results.

I know this is not the intended result, but my take away from this is that a majority of Republicans continues to support NSA surveillance no matter who is in office.

This is ironic considering how much they hate the government...

Every government employee who carries a gun is trustworthy and honorable while every government employee who carries a pencil is the modern face of tyranny.

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