After the strike on Saddam's compound the first night of the war, 70% of Americans thought the war was going well. Now, 38% of Americans think the war is going well. (source: NPR) This is WITH near-exclusive pro-war coverage from our news outlets. Wait until the press honeymoon is over. The American public has no stomach for this.
Re: Re: Public Opinion Polls ' May i remind everyone that just becuase they don't think the war is going real well, doesn't mean they don't support is still.
Sorry but this is incorrect. It was spun this was in an AP story, and NPR is just repeating it. 38% think the war the war is going very well. An additional 41% think the war is going fairly well. This is understandable after there were casualties over the weekend. From the Pew poll: Shame on AP for spinning it this way, and shame on NPR for not checking it out.
Nope. From the blogosphere http://www.command-post.org/archives/001915.html: "Pew Research Center's press release titled "Public Confidence in War Effort Falters" grabbed much media attention with a dramatic graph, which showed a huge drop for "How well is the war going?"--from a high of 71% on Saturday to a low of 38% on Monday. The big drop was for those who responded "very well." Compounding Pew's spin, the Associated Press (copied by most other media) shortened "very well" to "well" without including the next response category. Wrong. Pressing the PRC for more detail, I found that in fact, the opposite was true. When you include those who responded fairly well, favorable public opinion on the war's progress increased --from 80.1% Thursday to 85.3% Monday. Raw Percents for Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday: Very well - 49.9, 70.9, 70.7, 51.6, 38.1 Fairly well - 30.2, 22.8, 22.2, 34.3, 47.2 subtotals - 80.1, 93.7, 92.9, 85.9, 85.3 (Above detail was provided to me directly by Peyton M. Craighill at Pew.)" The only thing that dropped was "very well" so in fact the percentage of people who think the war is going well is 85% and not 38% EDIT: Fixed a bad link.
Read John Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. The gist of the argument is that people basically don't have opinions. When asked for one - by pollsters for instance - they make one up on the fly by reacting to immediate cues. Hence, there's often great fluctuation in "public opinion" depending on changes in the immediate cues - like news, question wording etc. - that people find themselves confronted with. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_1/104-4144078-7173525?v=glance&s=books
I haven't read that book or even looked at the link. It's possible that many people don't have opinions about various polling topics, but this is one case where I think most people have some opinion. The polling here reflects pretty well how the war is going.
That's interesting, but what's disturbing, to me, is when CNN does a wrapup of the protests around the globe. And you see that there were 30 people arrested in SoKo trying to get into our embassy there. And you see that there was violence in the Australian protests. And on and on. In the future, we won't talk of Pyrrhic victories, but Bushic victories.