idiggory wrote:
A. What justification do you have for arguing that adding a 2-month time limit on the repeal is a minor additional clause to the open ended question of "Should DADT be repealed?"
Because other polls which included changed "for/against" formulations but that didn't mention a lame duck session also shifted the results.
In addition to the one I quoted, there were at least two others that mentioned repealing the law, without any assumption of any specific session, which were also dramatically different than the polling results when just asked if they should be allowed to serve openly.
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B. Wait, so you argued that the word choice wouldn't make a profound difference and then you turn around and IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH said it would make a profound one?
I've argued all along that word choice changes the results of polls. And I'll even grant you that the word choice regarding the "current Democratic Congress" affects the result as well. Now, will you admit that the word choice about repealing a law verses "allowing them to serve openly" also affects the polling results?
That was my entire point. I was not excluding other factors. It is quite amusing that so many people leaped to the "lame duck session" bit as though that countered what I was saying. I don't care about that. Even when it's not mentioned, the polls consistently show up at mid 50s to mid 30s repeal/dont-repeal, while it's 70 to 20 when it's "allow to serve openly/don't allow to serve openly".
I was observing that difference. Nothing more. Sheesh!
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A question that asks "Do you think DADT should be repealed?" includes ALL those people. Who were a very large portion of the population.
A question that asks "Should DADT be repealed before the end of the year?" alienates everyone but those people who want it repealed and don't care about how ready the military would be for the policy change.
Yes, great. But I don't really consider that a word choice so much as a factor of the poll question itself. I'm talking about things that are purely about how one words the question, and how they affect the results. I guess my mistake was using an example where there was a modification to the question. I honestly didn't even see it or think it mattered for the point I was making. I could just as easily chosen any of a number of other examples. That was just the first on in the list.
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This applies to your reference to the next poll as well. In November, 50% of people were willing to repeal DADT when asked a general question rather than a temporally loaded one. 38% wanted DADT to stay in place regardless.
Yes, at the same time period when 72% of the people thought that gays should be allowed to openly serve in the military.
Do you see the discrepancy I'm talking about? It's still there, isn't it? And it can't be explained away by people not wanting to pass it during a lame duck session, or by the end of the year.
That's what I was talking about.
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What we see by looking at the later polls is that, after the pentagon's report, favor in repealing DADT jumps quite a bit.
Irrelevant to the point I was making. And frankly, there's no evidence of this. All of the polls asking if DADT should be repealed occurred in November. We don't have any from December, but as I already pointed out the "allow to serve openly" question from December only went up 2% between Feb and Dec. I'll point out that most of the "repeal/don't repeal" polls went up by similar amounts between similar periods of time (Feb 1020 and Nov 2010), so it's a stretch to argue that the pentagon report had anything at all to do with this.
What we can say is that based on whether we're talking about a positive or a negative, the poll numbers change. Heck. Even when we change the wording to "voting for a law which would allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military" we get 67% voting for. Once again, we see a statistically relevant difference based solely on how the poll is worded. Voting for a law which allows gays to serve openly in the military is identical to "repealing DADT" in a realistic sense, right? Yet when we word it as voting "for" something, we get better results than when we're "repealing" something.
It's an innate aspect of psychology. We tend to look more favorably on things written in positive ways. We're more likely to be for something that is worded as allowing, giving, enabling, or passing/creating, than we are to be for something that is worded as stopping, ending, repealing, prohibiting, etc...
That's seriously the *only* point I was making. It's kinda funny that so many people are so insistent on denying that this occurs. It's right there in front of you.
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My problem with the marist poll is that they only put it out once. If they had asked the same question a second time two weeks ago, we might have gotten some very interesting data. The problem is that they only did one survey and did it on a temporally loaded question that no other poll shared. Which makes the data they provide ALONE useless. So you must examine other polls to make up for its lack of info over time.
Great. Look at the other ones then. You're smart enough to follow the point I'm making. So instead of nit picking the example I picked, why don't you examine the list of polls and see if the trend I pointed out is there? You know, see if I'm right instead of looking only at things that counter what I said.
I'd make another psychological observation about the responses I've been getting, but this is enough for one day I suppose.