IBD on impeachment

apparently Investor's Business Daily wrote an article last week about our impeachment polling.

"Wishful Polling
By Investor's Business Daily
Posted 11/11/2005

Public Opinion: Polling, they say, is part science and part art. If so, the art part that some polling organizations are practicing is getting blacker by the day.

Take Zogby International. The last time we visited the "highly regarded, nonpartisan polling company," as its clients refer to it, was early July. While the rest of us were celebrating the nation's 229th birthday, Zogby was doing its patriotic part by releasing a poll on how many Americans think President Bush should be impeached.

Never mind that few outside the rabid left were even entertaining the "i" word. Zogby apparently felt it was time they started. Seems that President John Zogby felt President Bush "did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq."

What Zogby found June 27-29 was that 42% of Americans supported impeachment and 50% did not. The result was significant enough, Zogby said, that he intended to follow up.

Sure enough, he was back in the field Oct. 29 through Nov. 2. But instead of simply asking people if they supported impeachment or not, as was the case in the first poll, he tossed in a hypothetical:

"If the president did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment." Agree or disagree? (53% agreed this time and 42% disagreed.)

The operative word, of course, is "if." As in: "If so-and-so is still beating his wife, do you agree that somebody ought to do something about it?"

Some might call that a leading question. Those in the business might call it a "push-poll question." Whatever it is, we'd say it's inappropriate unless the subject of impeachment has been in the news. And as proof it hasn't, we submit this from the Web site of AfterDowningStreet.org, which paid for the second Zogby poll:

"The strong support for impeachment found in this poll is especially surprising because the views of impeachment supporters are entirely absent from the broadcast and print media, and can only be found on the Internet and in street protests . . ." (emphasis ours).

So here we have a case of an activist group frustrated that it hasn't gotten more traction hiring a pollster to help it get some. In fact, AfterDowningStreet.org admits it hired Zogby to do the poll after a group called Democrats.com failed to get major polling organizations to include an impeachment question in their regular polling.

AfterDowningStreet.org — a "coalition of veterans, peace and political activist groups" — said it continues to urge polling firms to get aboard the impeachment bandwagon. "If they do not, (we) will continue to commission regular polls."

This wouldn't be noteworthy except for the fact that another reputable polling firm apparently has taken the bait. Ipsos, the French firm that America's Associated Press uses for its polling, asked a similar impeachment question Oct. 8-9 (and found 50% in favor).

The media have enough of a credibility problem without professional pollsters, for whom credibility is everything, getting logrolled by activist groups with whom they might agree."

david swanson wrote a reply.