I saw the latest Field Poll of California this morning, but did not have a chance to look at it until now.
The release itself only touches on 6 questions, and on most they don't provide crosstabs. The main exception to this is that they provided a lot of detail on those who disapprove of Obama's performance. From their write-up:
The latest Field Poll finds that while 51% of California voters approve of the President's overall performance, a growing proportion (43%) disapprove. This represents an increase of 8 percentage points in the proportion disapproving since July. While the growth in the number of Californians disapproving spans most demographic subgroups, some of the greatest increases have occurred among voter segments who have been among the President’s strongest supporters. This includes independent voters with no party preference (+16), Latinos (+16), union-affiliated households (+18), and women (+13).
Oddly, they didn't specifically call out the subgroup that had the greatest increase in disapproval: those with no more than a high school education. Let's rectify that:
| Subgroup | Feb. Disapproval | Dec. Disapproval | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| No Party Preference | 24% | 40% | +16 |
| Female | 27% | 40% | +13 |
| Latino | 18% | 34% | +16 |
| Union Affiliated | 25% | 43% | +18 |
| High School Graduate Or Less | 26% | 50% | +24 |
The subgroups have, according to the methodology details, a margin of error of +/-4.5%1.
I have no idea why they would have skipped over the subgroup that moved the most when mentioning the groups that had moved the most from a position of low disapproval. As the table above shows, they had comparably low disapproval to the other groups the commentary said "have been among the President's strongest supporters."
If we assume that the measured percentages are correct, then it would be interesting to know why that subgroup had the largest swing towards disapproval. One possible reason would be that those less educated may have taken the President (and other Democrats) at face value with his various Obamacare promises more than other groups did. Whatever the specific reason, it seems likely that it is Obamacare related.
Things to look out for in this regard: if polls from other states show this same erosion in this subgroup, or if other California polls have breakouts on other questions that might give more insight towards why this group in particular is souring.
1 The methodology details in the release touch on two things I spoke about in this post made last week. They get a round of applause for including this explanation:
The maximum sampling error for results from the overall sample is +/- 3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, while findings from the random subsample have a sampling error of +/- 4.5 percentage points. The maximum sampling error is based on results in the middle of the sampling distribution (i.e., percentages at or near 50%). Percentages at either end of the distribution (those closer to 10% or 90%) have a smaller margin of error.
They do not get a round of applause for stating the margin of error to one decimal point while reporting the results to the nearest integer.
No comments:
Post a Comment
By and large I am going to rely on Twitter to be the 'comments' section here. You can submit comments, but moderation is enabled, and nearly all of the time I am not even going to check the moderation queue (although in some circumstances, I just might).