{"id":10804,"date":"2015-09-01T19:41:18","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T19:41:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10804"},"modified":"2015-09-01T19:41:18","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T19:41:18","slug":"should-pols-care-about-polls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=10804","title":{"rendered":"Should pols care about polls?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Politicians say all the time — sometimes boastfully — that they don’t care about public opinion polls.<\/p>\n

My answer? They should care. Why? Because they represent the people being questioned by pollsters. Politicians aren’t supposed to operate in a vacuum. They’re supposed to understand what their constituents are thinking about critical issues of the day.<\/p>\n

Let’s take the Iran nuclear deal … as an example.<\/p>\n

A new poll shows Americans favor the deal <\/a>worked out with other great powers that would prohibit Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. The University of Maryland survey says 55 percent of Americans favor the deal and want Congress to approve it.<\/p>\n

Do politicians ignore the poll? Well, I guess one would have to examine the poll closely to see if it was done without bias and scientifically. Pollsters shouldn’t ask loaded questions aimed at generating desired responses.<\/p>\n

All congressional Republicans appear to oppose the deal. Most Democrats appear to support it. Are they defying the poll results of constituents whose interests they represent?<\/p>\n

According to The Hill: “The poll was conducted online, and the participants went through an in-depth process of listening to arguments from both sides. People were subjected to a detailed list of critiques of the agreement, followed by rebuttals to those arguments with reasons to get behind the deal.<\/p>\n

“The most convincing criticisms focused on the lack of ‘anytime\/anywhere’ inspections of Iranian facilities, the fact that limits on Iran\u2019s nuclear development ‘will go away’ in 15 years and Iran\u2019s ability to use the money that it receives under the deal to threaten regional security. A majority of Democrats said those arguments were either ‘somewhat’ or ‘very convincing.’<\/p>\n

\u201c’There is a lot of concern about key terms of the deal, especially the limits on inspections and the release of frozen funds to Iran,’ Steven Kull, director of the university\u2019s Program for Public Consultation, said in a statement.”<\/p>\n

It doesn’t appear, therefore, that this survey was designed to elicit the results it produced.<\/p>\n

Do members of Congress\u00a0accept and act on those poll\u00a0results or do they proceed as if they know better than their bosses?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n\n

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Politicians say all the time — sometimes boastfully — that they don’t care about public opinion polls. My answer? They should care. Why? Because they represent the people being questioned by pollsters. Politicians aren’t supposed to operate in a vacuum. They’re supposed to understand what their constituents are thinking about critical issues of the day. … Continue reading Should pols care about polls?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1112,2315,3774,5423],"class_list":["post-10804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-news","tag-congress","tag-iran-nuclear-deal","tag-public-opinion-surveys","tag-university-of-maryland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10806,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10804\/revisions\/10806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}