Posted on 03/13/2019 11:34:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Over 80 percent of American voters support the Green New Deal (GND), or so claim its backers citing a recent survey by a group of academic pollsters. Furthermore, this public endorsement is supposedly bipartisan, with 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans indicating that they either strongly or somewhat support the Far Left package to reshape the entire American economy around “green energy” in the course of the next decade.
A very different story lurks beneath the surface of these impressive-looking statistics. Although the survey was conducted by a team of professors at George Mason University in Virginia and Yale University in Connecticut, it was essentially a “push poll” designed to bias respondents in favor of the proposition.
The trick behind the outcome may be seen in the question’s wording. Rather than asking voters directly about the GND, the pollsters first presented them with a glowing paragraph-length synopsis that touted the proposition’s fantastical claims:
Some members of Congress are proposing a “Green New Deal” for the U.S. They say that a Green New Deal will produce jobs and strengthen America’s economy by accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. The Deal would generate 100% of the nation’s electricity from clean, renewable sources within the next 10 years; upgrade the nation’s energy grid, buildings, and transportation infrastructure; increase energy efficiency; invest in green technology research and development; and provide training for jobs in the new green economy.
Note that this paragraph intentionally leads the respondents toward a favorable view of the program.
It extols the GND promises of a “green energy” conversion on a scientifically impossible 10-year timeline as if it is a given. It promises an abundance of jobs and economic growth without revealing that these features depend upon the simultaneous adoption of an unprecedented federal jobs-guarantee program that would effectively place large swaths of the economy under direct federal government management.
It offers no indication that the same jobs-guarantee program would likely culminate in an unwieldy bureaucratic disaster of centralized economic planning. It makes no mention of the proposal’s extremist calls to phase out air travel in favor of trains, or to subject every building in America to costly renovation and reconstruction in order to meet new energy-efficiency rules. And it says not a word about the extreme price tag of the entire package, which certainly breaks into the tens of trillions of dollars and may reach as high as $93 trillion when all is said and done.
Instead, all of the pitfalls of the GND are conveniently brushed aside while all of its promised benefits, no matter how unrealistic or expensive, are presented to the survey’s respondents as if they were neutral and factual truths.
This combination of intentional omissions and leading questions exploited public ignorance to produce a skewed result. As a relatively new proposition, the details of the GND are still unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans. The pollsters confirmed this finding in a separate question that showed 83 percent of respondents knew “nothing at all” about the program’s details. After supplying them with an overly rosy and biased synopsis of those details, they unsurprisingly found large majorities in favor.
Loaded opinion polling of this type is a commonly encountered dirty trick in partisan political campaigns, where marketing firms associated with a certain candidate or policy try to build the illusion of public support (or hostility to the opposing party’s candidate) by asking intentionally loaded survey questions and then reporting the results as if they contained an accurate measure of public opinion. Long controversial, these tactics violate standard practices in survey design and question construction.
Unfortunately, the pollsters in this case are not political campaign consultants — they’re university professors at research institutes specializing in “climate change communication.” Given the way that they skewed their poll results toward the GND with biased and loaded questioning, it’s reasonable to ask whether their research output crossed the ethical line separating scholarship from politically motivated advocacy.
This doesn’t surprise me. The “Green New Deal” is filled with a bunch of feel good environmentalism and give-aways to the poor and middle class, and its all paid for by the mythical “rich.” Americans have lost any ability to perform an honest cost-benefit analysis of legislation. Their analysis comes down to “environment = good” and “business = bad” and “the rich can pay for everything.”
Since almost nobody knows what’s really in it that is possible.
I’ve never met a person that is for it.
90% of Americans also supported Hillary for president until the Russians hacked their computers and told their owners to vote for Trump.
“Over 80 percent of American voters support the Green New Deal (GND), or so claim its backers citing a recent survey by a group of academic pollsters. Furthermore, this public endorsement is supposedly bipartisan, with 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans indicating that they either strongly or somewhat support the Far Left package”
And the same percentages said they believe in the Tooth
fairy and Easter Bunny.
They are just blatantly lying.....is anyone surprised? And this just in, a co-founder of Greenpeace says Climate Change is fake......and no one in the MSM is reporting this.
It amazes me that people will believe these polls. Does anyone really think that the polls have all of a sudden become honest and accurate since 2016?
I have been polled before, and, if the topic is controversial, such as abortion, there is ALWAYS one question that is a monkey wrench question, thrown in to corral people into a desired outcome.
Once, the questions were about prayer in school. After answering in the affirmative that I did support prayer in school, I was asked the question: “Should students be forced to pray in school?”
How do you force a student to pray? You can’t. Has anyone ever insisted that students should be forced to pray? Of course not. It was a smear disguised as a question to put people on the defensive.
Methods
These data were produced by the bi-annual Climate Change in the American Mind survey — a nationally-representative analysis of public opinion on climate change in the United States conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
Surveys were conducted using the Ipsos KnowledgePanel®, a representative online panel of U.S. adults (18+), from November 28 to December 11, 2018. All questionnaires were self-administered by respondents in a web-based environment. This report includes the registered voters (n=966), from the full sample (n=1,114). Unweighted base sizes for the political subgroups are as follows: Democrats (n=466; liberal Democrats n=295, moderate/conservative Democrats n=168), Republicans (n=356; conservative Republicans n=238, moderate/liberal Republicans n=116), Independents (n=95).
References to Republicans and Democrats throughout include respondents who initially identify as either a Republican or Democrat, as well as those who do not initially identify as Republicans or Democrats but who say they “are closer to” one party or the other (i.e., “leaners”) in a follow-up question. The category “Independents” does not include any of these “leaners.”
Average margin of error for both the full sample and registered voter subset: +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The margin of error for each political subgroup is larger. Bases specified are unweighted, but percentages are weighted to align with U.S. Census parameters. For tabulation purposes, percentage points are rounded to the nearest whole number. As a result, percentages in a given chart may total slightly higher or lower than 100%. Additionally, summed response categories (e.g., “strongly support” + “somewhat support”) are rounded after sums are calculated (e.g., 1.3% + 1.3% = 2.6%, which, after rounding would appear in a chart as 1% + 1% = 3%).
If you spread the word that everyone, inc those who pay no taxes now, will have a tax rate or 46% or more to support the Green Deal polling would change fast.
Forget the cow flatulence, this is bull ****. Fake poll.
Like Merle Haggard sang:
“Eatin’ rainbow stew in a silver spoon
Underneath that sky of blue
We’ll all be drinkin’ that free bubble-ubb
And eatin’ that rainbow stew…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jrPgqxMeuo
This is too easy (to defraud)
Q: “Do you favor clean water?”
A: Yes
“Then you are in favor of the “Green New Deal”!
Reality can be light years away from this nonsense but I get the sense that it remains just out of reach...
I think just the term “New Deal” appeals to a lot of people.
A whole lot of people out there feel they’ve been gettin’ SCROOOOOOOD for decades and they hunger for a “New Deal”
(hell, that’s largely what got Trump elected).
The Democrats rarely do anything that is not Focus Group Tested.
I wasn’t looking at it from that perspective - make a lot of sense though.
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