Bogus Jewish Opinion Ratings for Obama

David Streeter — December 10, 2009 – 12:43 pm | GOP Hypocrisies | Polls | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

Quinnipiac University released a poll that showed a highly suspect drop in President Barack Obama’s approval rating among American Jews. Sensing that something was awry, JTA’s Eric Fingerhut debunked the poll.

Fingerhut found:

...when looking specifically at the Jewish number and the findings from three previous surveys, the swings are so dramatic to not make any sense.

Let’s start in August, when a July 27-Aug.3 Quinnipiac survey found Obama with a 66 percent approval rating in the Jewish community, to just 30 percent disapproval. Nothing particularly noteworthy or surprising there.

But two months later, in a poll taken from Sept. 29-Oct. 5 that nobody in the Jewish community even noticed, Obama’s approval among Jews, according to Quinnipiac, dropped like a rock—all the way down to 46 percent. In fact, 47 percent disapproved of Obama in that poll.

But hold on, six weeks later, Obama had gained a remarkable 29 percentage points—for no apparent reason—in a poll taken Nov. 9-16. He registered 75 percent approval in that poll and just 22 percent disapproval.

And then we get to the latest poll, taken from Dec. 1-6, which found Obama at just 52 percent approval, compared to 35 percent disapproval. So the president lost 25 percentage points of support in a couple weeks. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Unless you think that White House Chanukah party guest list reduction really took a toll on the president’s popularity among Jews ... But seriously, the one major event that happened in that time was the announcement of an Israeli settlement freeze, but it’s hard to see that resulting in a large swing either way in the president’s popularity—since it had been talked about for months.

Apparently, right-wing outlets including the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) and The American Thinker do not believe in basic textbook statistical analysis. RJC put out a press release trumpeting the poll’s results, and The American Thinker jumped on the opportunity to expand on the flawed logic.

David A. Harris, NJDC’s President, provides a strong response to the poll:

This is the latest in a long stream of examples in which the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) leans on polls with truly tiny Jewish subsamples, yielding unacceptably high margins of error. In this case, the wild fluctuation from month to month in Quinnipiac’s Jewish approval rating—swinging more than 20 percent in three weeks—shows how unreliable this sample is, and how desperate and over-reaching the RJC are in their efforts.

It should be noted that RJC also recklessly put its hopes in a recent poll about Jewish voting patterns in the New Jersey gubernatorial election. However, the poll was so unreliable that Politico had to basically run a correction. But even if the New Jersey poll and the Quinnipiac poll were true, RJC and its allies should not be jumping for joy. According to The Jewish Week‘s Jim Besser:

[When] [a]sked if they approve of the way Republicans in Congress are handling their jobs, there was a much bigger gap, with 66 percent of Jewish voters disapproving, 25 percent approving. Predictably, Jews rated congressional Republicans lower than any other religious group. You can bet THAT number didn’t appear in the RJC press release.

Besser also wrote in a later piece:

...Republican Jewish Coalition director Matthew Brooks, in his press release, wrote that the poll showed that “the Jewish community has been troubled by the efforts of this administration to pressure Israel on the issue of ‘settlements’ and has raised questions about the sovereignty of Israel over a united Jerusalem. These and other actions by the President have fueled the growing ‘buyers’ remorse’ on the part of Jewish voters.”

Nice try, Matt, but there’s nothing in the survey about Jerusalem, settlements, Israel or foreign policy.

As Harris said:

I know the RJC and their friends continue to hope for their Chanukah miracle, but this flawed polling result isn’t it.

Comments

There are no comments for this entry