How Polls Can Mislead
Nate Cohn
AUG. 4, 2017
... An issue position might be broadly popular, but those who back the minority view may be far more likely to vote on the issue. This is a common explanation for why gun control seems to play so poorly for the Democrats. The liberal viewpoint on gun control and background checks really is popular; it’s just that the conservatives back their viewpoint far more enthusiastically ...
... Gun control and immigration overhaul might be popular nationwide, for example, but the electoral politics could play differently if a significant share of a persuadable and targeted voting group took the position not favored by the majority ...
... it’s hard to examine groups of persuadable voters using individual national polls ...
Political scientists have long argued that the public is like a thermostat: It tends to move against the direction of policy change and the party in power. President Obama’s health care push, for instance, soured voters on government involvement in health care; President Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act has sent attitudes in the other direction. If public opinion toward policy-making tends to move against the initiatives of the incumbent president, a bold policy agenda — like the one pursued by the Democrats during the Obama administration — might be politically damaging even if the individual proposals might otherwise be popular ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/affirmative-action-and-why-polls-on-issues-are-often-misleading.html
