Hey, everybody. Remember last week's huge kerfuffle over Bob Woodward, and his spat with the White House over an obsequious, groveling apology that Gene Sperling sent him in an email, which Woodward somehow misconstrued as some sort of threat? If your answer is "No," then congratulations! You are a normal human American.
You see, we were actually interested in whether or not this media spat story that became such a big deal to everyone inside the Beltway -- ourselves included -- ended up mattering to anyone outside our insular little community of nonsense. And so HuffPost Pollster, in conjunction with YouGov, polled one thousand adults, selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population, and asked them if they'd heard much about the Woodward-Sperling contretemps. And the people spoke with a clear voice: "What was that all about again?"
Yes, fully 80 percent of the people surveyed had heard little to nothing about the matter, or were not sure either way. Which was probably why two-thirds of the people surveyed couldn't correctly identify what the commotion was about.
It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the vast majority of respondents, when asked how much they cared about the incident averred that they cared very little, indeed, if at all.
Now as you might imagine, there were some matters of mild statistical significance in the partisan breakdown of the respondents. Republicans were more likely to have heard something about the Woodward-White House fight (29 percent of them had "heard a lot" about the incident, compared to 15 percent of Democrats,) and care about it 51 percent of Republicans cared "a lot" or "somewhat," as compared to 19 percent of Democrats). More Democrats than Republicans said that they had heard "nothing at all" about it, by a 46-27 percent margin.
But for the most part, people just said "Feh, whatever" and got on with their lives, without much concern for what two obscure figures on the political landscape were beefing about, the end.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted March 1-2 among 1,000 U.S. adults. The poll used a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling.
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