Hacker News Reader

Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

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."

View on HN

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.)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com