When polls force respondents to pick one of two partisan jargon options without an effort to find out what *the respondents* really think, we're quite possibly misrepresenting public opinion.

this week's Leading Indicators @nationaljournal
(unlocked)
nationaljournal.com/s/721303/how-p… @nationaljournal Now, if it's reported appropriately, great. But more often than not, both pollsters and headlines run away with the results as "this is what people want!!" (provided it aligns with their priors)

The adult population of Texas is about 22.5 million people. Abbott received about 4.4m votes. Rural red outvoted urban blue, as it always does.

https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1653136284502597661

I've been saying for years that Dems have an organizing problem in Texas. Beto O'Rourke was never going to single-handedly solve that, nor was all the out-of-state support specific to Beto.

I mean, yes, but this is machine politics the way it always has been. Nothing new in the world. It's how we got Biden.

Is that how it *should* be? Eh. idk. The other method isn't really working out for Republicans.

https://twitter.com/whstancil/status/1635287387835359234

I think the real answer to why Democrats underwhelm is that we're more of a centrist country than most liberals want to believe.

NEW REPORT from the PRRI team:

https://twitter.com/PRRIpoll/status/1623290559149514754

We estimate that 10% of Americans are adherents to Christian nationalist beliefs. Another 19% are sympathetic to those beliefs.

Then we have this. Survey design 101: If you ask people if something is a problem, they will tell you it's a problem. This is called acquiescence bias - and it's usually discussed with agree-disagree questions, but it's also an issue with one-sided scales like this. The question needs to be interpreted with caution knowing that is a possibility - not used to yell about a huge societal problem. The acquiescence problem is also supported by: 55% of people say they hold their tongues, yet 84% say this is a somewhat/very serious problem.

A thread on why the NYTimes op-ed is a bad use of polling.
To be clear, I am talking about the USE of it; this is not about the fine folks at Siena.

The poll is used to say OMG, LOOK, WE HAVE A BIG PROBLEM. Here's why that's a bad use of the polling: We start here. People are saying they "hold their tongue." Okay. I grew up with the attitude that you don't talk about politics or religion in polite company. (lol that I study both - that lesson sank in, eh?) Filtering is a way of getting along in the world. This is not new.

In case anyone else wants to spend part of their Saturday combing through Texas polling crosstabs. The @TexasMonthly
article is a good summary.

texasmonthly.com/news-politics/…

uttyler.edu/politicalscien… @TexasMonthly Texas generally looks a whole lot like the epicenter of the culture war - conservative bent is still very strong, but socially sliding a bit leftward.

I'd love to see many more tabs on this - urban/rural, more religion breaks, etc - but I probably mostly know what they'd say.

It's beginning to feel like the downsides of forcing a filibuster vote are pretty significant for Democrats... the circular firing squad has clearly developed and taken the attention from the question of why 0 Republicans will support a voting rights bill. Color me unimpressed with Dem leadership... (although that's kind of always - I'm that person in the Pew party typology who really dislikes everyone on every side.)