I’ve been on a combination of work and personal travel since late June and am still catching up on all the news. I’m 99% sure my opinion will be negative but I can’t have one grounded in the actual facts of the meeting until I’m caught up. And I imagine more than 18% doesn’t even read a newspaper or watch TV news, so I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.
I would suspect that the 33% found by that poll to support Trump over his “handling” (ha!) of the Helsinki meeting, would be found to coincide almost exactly with the percentage of Americans who would score as ‘white and anxious about racial/ethnic makeup of the US population’ (or similar measure).
In other words, Trump’s corruption and misconduct—even his blatant show of servility toward Putin—can and will always be explained away by that 33%, so long as Trump continues to persecute non-whites (through Sessions and Homeland Security, mainly) and say mean things about black people on Twitter.
As Tom Clancy wrote in one of his novels (might have been Executive Orders): You can be running against Adolf Hitler, the two of you each being backed by one of the main political parties of the US, and Hitler will still get about 40% of the vote just by virtue of being one of the two parties’ nominee.
Not saying Trump is Hitler, but a president will have a certain fraction of the electorate baked in as his support. Even Nixon had an approval rating of around 20% when he resigned post Watergate, IIRC.
Nixon maintained an overall approval rating in the mid 20s throughout 1974, which was probably his hardest-core base. Trump’s overall approval rating (not just approval of the summit) really hasn’t ever dipped below the mid 30s, and at this point, I don’t know that there’s anything that’s going to shake that 35-ish percent away from him.
The hard core ATers are an odd lot. I’m convinced they’re as much a personality cult as the Jim Jones group in Guyana. They cannot be reasoned with, there is no evidence that would convince them of anything, they must be outvoted.
Fortunately, their numbers should drop. They’re disproportionately old. The Grim Reaper will collect more of them than what are added to their ranks. The anti-Donald coalition will only get bigger and more energized. At least that’s what has to happen for democracy to survive in the world.
“Why yes, ma’am, I’d love to do a fifteen-minute poll with you! Please ask me your questions, and I’ll say ‘no opinion’ as a way of telling you to mind your own business!”
Sorry, my scenario is undoubtedly true. Many people saying ‘no opinion’ to a question do in fact have an opinion on that question; they just don’t wish to publicly answer it. I can’t tell you if it’s 10% of the individuals answering no opinion or 90%, but a number will have a private opinion to the question.
“A number”? I can’t argue with that. Zero, after all, is “a number.”
My hunch is that the number of people that agree to go through all the questions of a political poll, but then decide to “no opinion” on matters they have strong opinions about, is minuscule. I am, of course, open to evidence to the contrary.
You are subtly trying to misrepresent what we are disagreeing on. At no point did I say these people held a ‘strong opinion’. I simply said a number of them will have held an opinion on the question; any form of opinion. Their opinion may be a partial opinion, a strong opinion, a weak opinion, a foolish opinion or an informed opinion. My evidence is in the form of opinion polls notoriously getting public opinion wrong. One reason for pollsters getting public opinion wrong is that not every poll responder is entirely honest in their answers.
I have to agree with LHoD on this one. I can’t see agreeing to do the poll and then not answering questions. The polls are anonymous. What purpose does it serve to agree to participate and then not answer?
The summit poll understates the core of Trump’s support, I think, because his overall approval rating doesn’t seem to have budged as a result of the summit. Presumably this means that of the people disapproving of the summit, there is a significant portion that nonetheless does not value the issue particularly highly.
That people will sometimes skip poll questions isn’t exactly a new and exotic phenomenon. Any baby’s-first-social-science textbook that deals with public response data should help you see if you can’t figure it out on your own.
demographic questions on age group , race, income , etc. are almost always at the end of a survey since a lot of people don’t like answering those. If you put at them at the start a lot of people would not answer any questions.