Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Is the long incumbent honeymoon over?


For as long as political polls have been conducted, Americans have said they like their own congressperson more than they like the Congress as a whole.

It was a troubling but all too familiar example of voters—and people in general—holding conspicuously incompatible views about some political reality.

Now, for the first time, we have some evidence that maybe the Teflon appeal of “my local congressman” is starting to peel off, and maybe start swirling around in the toilet….


Vox.com says a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that 51% of respondents said they disapprove of their own representative’s performance. That’s the first time the disapproval number has reflected majority opinion since that poll started about 25 years ago.

Not too hard to figure out why the disapproval numbers are trending higher.

The current Congress is the most do-nothing Congress in history, and specifically, the Senate and the House haven’t really done anything effective in the last 5 years to boost growth in our national economy and help create jobs for millions of Americans who want to work.

Do the right thing: don’t vote for your incumbent members of Congress every chance you get.

p.s. I don’t want to forget to mention that all public opinion polls are inaccurate, we should be very leery of interpreting the results. No polling company comes even close to reaching a true random sample of respondents in this era of Caller ID, cell phone usage and the increasing reluctance of so many people to actually answer the phone when it rings. All polling companies cook their data by “weighting” the results in multiple dimensions, that is, changing the de facto results of the survey, allegedly to increase the accuracy by manipulating the data so it nominally reflects the arbitrarily assumed attributes of the target population.
I think you can imagine how that turns out.






No comments:

Post a Comment