Dyssonance

The Daily Kos hired someone to do a survey of Republicans.

It was a phone survey, 2003 folks, suitably random, and looking into the depths of the particulars used, yeah the margin of Error is about right, although I’m inclined to give it about a 6% MoE myself.  Fairness requires me to disclose that I tend to over inflate my margins of error just cause I like to be safe.

I became aware of it in my rounds of various blogs today before I get my hind end into gear and actually prepare for creating change. In this case, I found it at Feministe, which is one of six feminist blogs I read consistently.

Jill’s take on the issue talks about wanting to move, because to her, the messages she pulled from the stats are pretty scary.

I was a republican.  And to me the stuff is pretty scary as well.  I left the party when it became obvious that those in power were far too much like the way the survey came out than the kind of republican I am.  Scary when your party moves so far to the right that you suddenly find yourself in the left.

But I wanted to put some perspective on these numbers.  And one of the best ways to do that is to look at the entire Population, not merely just the Republicans.

So, to do that, I turned to a second poll.  When you do that, you want one fairly independent of the original one, with a comparable margin and confidence level.

That led me to the Rasumussen numbers from the 1st of February, which are fairly reliable and very recent. I’m going to play with them a bit and use a figure of 33% of the population is Republican. That’s a bit high for right now, but it should make Republicans reading this feel a little better and allows for the margin of error.

That said, and using the format of Jill’s article at Feministe, here’s some perspective on the answers as given. (Jill, not picking on you, but you had the most interesting post, and I liked what you did, and you did some good pullouts.)

I’m going to use a round figure in my numbers.  Since we are discussing politics, I’m going to break that down into an adult population of people over 19.  I have to do that because the readily available fact sheet from the Census Bureau breaks it down that way.  This means I will subtract 27.5% of the total population as of this writing.  THis will give me some nice, flexible round numbers.

There are roughly 74 million Republicans in the United States right now, and about 78 million Democrats. That leaves roughly 68 million people who are neither Republican nor Democrat.

Now, normally I don’t bother with all of this linking and explanatory stuff, but I think that for this particular article, I’m going to do so, because I think this is important.  Perspective is critical since it allows us to step out of our own particular limitations and see things a bit more clearly.

What this tells us is that 3% of Republicans is equal to only 1% of the population.

I’m only going to tackle her first 6, as I don;t want to steal the power of her points too much, merely give a little bit of focus. You can do the rest.  Just divide whatever percentage she has up by 3 to get a bit of perspective on how they shape the dialog in proportion to their size.

Do you live in the United States? Here are some stats that will make you think about it.

1. 13% think Obama should be impeached (for what, exactly, is unclear).

2.  14% believe Obama was born in the United States. 12% believe he was not born in the U.S., and 7.3 percent are unsure.

3. 21% believe Obama is a Socialist. 7.3% are unsure.

4. About 9% believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win. 11% are unsure of whether or not he wants a terrorist victory.

5. 18.3% believe that Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Barack Obama. 11% are unsure. Only 4.7% believe that Palin is not more qualified than Obama. The survey did not ask participants if they understand the definition of “qualified.”

6. 22% of Americans either believe that Obama is a racist who hates white people, or aren’t sure if Obama is a racist who hates white people.

Oh, and, for reference, 1% of the adult population is around 22 million people right now.

Doing just those things changes the way the numbers look. Doing the exact same survey among Democrats would probably give us a much better idea now of some of the obstacles we face, as the above percentages only reflect a third of the country with any accuracy.

And one of the things that seeing this says when you realize that the LGBT population makes up between 8% and 16% of the total population, if we have enough real allies and can mobilize our own sides (LGBT + Women alone would do it), then we can indeed effect change at a local level that is really pretty cool.

Perspective is always important.

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