No Runny Eggs

(H/T – Pam)

You may or may not remember John Ziegler or his poll and video of Obama voters. For those of you who have short attention spans and don’t want to click back to the archives, Ziegler interviewed a dozen Obama voters right after they stepped out of the voting booth and asked them some basic current civics questions such as which party had control of Congress going into the election. He also commissioned a Zogby poll asking 512 Obama supporters those same questions. Needless to say, they blew chunks on that.

Also needless to say, the Nutroots were incensed, and claimed it was a misleading push poll designed to embarrass them. Ziegler offered to fund a follow-up poll involving McCain voters, and after getting turned down by Zogby, he went to Wilson Research Strategies and reran the poll among both McCain and Obama supporters, with an additional question on the Keating Five and a change on the “started his/her political career at an ex-terrorist’s house” question to name Bill Ayers specifically. The results are, shall we say, even more embarrassing for the Nutroots, at least among those that care about an educated populace.

Like everybody else, I’ll focus on the pre-election Congressional control question (pages 19-21 on the crosstabs), but run with something that hasn’t exactly been explored elsewhere. First off, let’s review the actual question (“Before this election, which political party controlled both houses of Congress?”), and the responses allowed (I assume in order because there isn’t a notation in the methodology to rotate, Republican, Democrat, neither Republican and Democrat were rotated with neither third; see Chris Wilson’s comment below). Among all 1000 participants, 51.4% got this correct by saying “Democrat”, 35.2% got it 100% wrong by saying “Republican”, 4.5% got it wrong by saying “Neither”, 8.5% admitted they didn’t know, and 2 of them refused to answer the question.

Let’s first delve into the Obama vs McCain voters that everybody else ran with. The designed split of 53.0% Obama voters versus 46.0% McCain voters is close enough to reality to run with. McCain voters got it right to the tune of 62.8% Democratic control, 26.5% Republican control, 6.1% “don’t know”, 4.1% neither, and 1 refusal. Obama voters got it wrong to the tune of 43.0% Republican control, 41.3% Democratic control, 10.6% “don’t know”, 4.9% neither, and 1 refusal.

Now, let’s deviate from the “blame the media” game everybody else is playing because while viewers of CNN and the broadcast networks couldn’t create a majority correct, they did manage a plurality. Instead, let’s take a look at the partisan splits on that question. This poll had a party split of 21.9% “strong Republican”, 10.1% “not-so-strong Republican” (or “soft” for short; for a 32.0% total “Republican”), 26.7% “independent/other”, 9.4% “not-so-strong Democrat”, 29.5% “strong Democrat” (for a 39.0% total “Democrat”), and 2.3% refusal (not reflected in the crosstabs). The highest percentage of those who got this question correct was among “strong Republicans”, at 65.8%. “Soft Republicans” were next at 60.4% correct, which gave the Republican universe a total of 64.1% correct. “Independents” were next at 55.1% correct. “Soft Democrats” could only manage a plurality correct of 45.1%. Worst were the “strong Democrats”, where only 36.6% got the question correct, and a near-majority of 48.5% got it 100% wrong.

If the GOP is “The Stupid Party”, what does that make the Democratic Party? No, you Lefties can’t appropriate “morons”, We AoSHQ Morons have already done that.

Revisions/extensions (2:39 pm 12/3/2008) – Chris Wilson, CEO of Wilson Research Strategies, points out that the first two prompted answers of the Congressional control question (Republican, Democratic) were rotated.

R&E part 2 (10:55 pm 12/3/2008) – Ed Morrissey interviewed John Ziegler late this afternoon.

R&E part 3 (11:03 pm 12/3/2008) – I thought I had corrected the link to the question list. Guess that’s what I get for assumptions. It is now pointing to the correct file.