Poll: tea party views outside mainstream. Where are such polls of lefty groups?

from theblogprof by The blogprof


Poll: tea party views outside mainstream. Where are such polls of lefty groups?: "

Saw this AP post over at the Detroit News over Thanksgiving: Poll finds tea party views outside mainstream. The poll is a fraud and the AP's own take on it reveals its bias:

Tea party backers fashion themselves as 'we the people,' but polls show the Republican Party's most conservative and energized voters are hardly your average crowd.

According to an Associated Press-GfK Poll this month, 84 percent who call themselves tea party supporters don't like how President Barack Obama is handling his job — a view shared by just 35 percent of all other adults. Tea partiers are about four times likelier than others to back repealing Obama's health care overhaul and twice as likely to favor renewing tax cuts for the highest-earning Americans.

Exit polls of voters in this month's congressional elections reveal similar gulfs. Most tea party supporters — 86 percent — want less government intrusion on people and businesses, but only 35 percent of other voters said so.

That last part is very important because it appears that the statistics have been fudged to show a there there where there is none. For example, lets say we have 100 people. 98 of them - let's call them the tea party - score 100% on a test. The other 2 scores a 50%. The way you could spin this is that most of the OTHER test takers score only 50%. What the AP is doing is it is separating the sample size along ideological lines to make it appear like there are far more non-tea party-minded people than there really are. In my example, the total comparison sample size should be 100 people, not 2. Nationwide, a plurality of voters see things the tea party's way. And here in MI: Detroit Free Press: 40% of Michigan voters back Tea Party, voters prefer cuts to higher taxes. The AP is trying to marginalize the tea party as a small, obscure movement. It failed.

In the bigger scope of things, when is the last time that the AP ran such a poll focusing on Moveon.org? Code Pink? Peta? The fact that they do so for the tea party indicates that it is a far bigger movement than the AP wants to admit.

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