One of the most stubborn points of faith in the conventional wisdom of the press corps is that the voters don't make electoral choices based on foreign policy. This belief comes from several sources. One of the them is the difficulty polls have in measuring that factor, which is only compounded by the frequent laziness that journalists show in using the poll data.
A couple of recent articles illustrate with a more careful analysis of polling data how mistaken that idea can be. Josh Marshall recently looked at the daily polling from the National Annenberg Election Survey in the days following David Kay's public announcement that "weapons of mass destruction" were unlikely to be found in Iraq. In a trend reflected in other polls, though not with the daily detail, both Bush's job approval rating and support for the war declined significantly.
I haven't looked myself at the detailed Annenberg data. But I would guess that support for the war in this case effectively means support for Bush's war policies in Iraq. Marshall comments: "For some time now, it's been conventional wisdom that most voters weren't overly troubled by the failure to find any weapons in the country, especially so long as other aspects of the war were going at least tolerably well. That assumption may have been very wrong."
He also points out that while Kay's announcement may have seemed like a non-event to those of us who have been following this story closely, for the general public it seems to have been a real tipping point, straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back moment on the Iraq War and the WMD claims. Good anecdotal evidence backing that up is the fact that even Fox whack-job Bill O'Reilly is saying of the WMD claims, "I was wrong. I am not pleased about it at all and I think all Americans should be concerned about this."
No comments:
Post a Comment