Polls and Prizes
Once, before shopping malls became something just this side of ghost towns, there were often people with clipboards ready to pounce on unsuspecting shoppers, asking them to come to a room where they’d get snacks, beverages and a $10-dollar gift certificate from the mall.
All they needed to do was provide their opinions. It could be about a TV show. Fast food. Or politics.
Now those opinion researchers have to turn to different means of attracting people.
So some, like YouGov, have turned primarily to the Internet.
If you’ve ever been faced with an online opinion poll — perhaps you’ve gotten an email from an airline asking whether you’d recommend it to someone and having clicked a response you now find yourself faced with pages of questions and little way of knowing when it will end, so you mutter something and close the page — one of the issues is that there isn’t necessarily a visible ending or a reward for enduring.
YouGov has an approach that allows participants to collect points that can be turned into cash or prizes. And who doesn’t like cash or prizes?
Which leads to a question about the motivations of the participants.
But we’ll let that go.
And turn to a recent CBS News/YouGov survey conducted April 9-12.
While a major focus was on the situation in the Middle East, there are also results that ought to give the Biden team some pause.
Strike that.
It ought to make the Biden team seriously reassess what they’re doing.
Or not.
No, it is not the 40% overall approval rating for the president — he’s been in the 40s since January 2022, so he is presumably comfortable in that space (although he’s down two points since February ’24, and south is not the direction he needs).
It’s not necessarily those who think the “condition of the national economy today” is “fairly” (31%) or “very” bad (30%). Those answers would probably change after the respondents got their prizes.
Those who said they thought things in the U.S. overall were going “somewhat” or “very badly” went on to answer that the reason for this was based, “a lot” on “The state of U.S. politics” -- 72% said that. In second place, at 66%, was “The U.S. economy.”
Now the unemployment rate is 3.8%. It has been between 3.7% and 3.9% for the past year. Meaning: those who want a job have one or can get one.
The inflation rate is 3.5%, which is (1) higher than the Federal Reserve would like (it wants 2%) but (2) significantly lower than the 8% of 2022.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 37,983 last week, nearly 13% higher than a year earlier.
Even though there is a war in the Middle East gas prices today are about (actually a smidge lower) what they were a year ago.
Evidently there is a disconnect between facts on the ground and Internet polling.
The result that the Biden team should really take stock of — because even if it is off by several points it is still a big number — is the president’s overall approval rating among those ages 18 to 29.
In February 55% of that cohort approved of Biden.
It is now 43%.
That is a decline of 22%.
Even if that poll is among those who are only in it for the prizes, losing a fifth of anyone is something a politician can ill afford.
Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.