A LARGE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SEE CLIMATE CHANGE AS A PROBLEM - Scott Clement: "A clear but declining majority of Americans say climate change is a serious problem facing the United States in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with giant partisan disagreement on all aspects of the issue....Sixty-three percent of Americans say climate change is a serious problem facing the country, slipping from 69 percent in June….[N]early half of Americans, 47 percent, say the federal government should do more to deal with global warming than it does today, marking a decline from 61 percent in 2008 during the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency." [WashPost]
Americans want the U.S. to lead climate change fight - HuffPollster: "Most Americans believe climate change is real, and want the U.S. to take the lead in fighting it, according to a set of HuffPost/YouGov surveys taken during the runup to the Paris climate summit, a meeting of more than 100 world leaders to discuss taking action against climate change. A 52 percent majority of Americans think the U.S. should take a global leadership role in trying to prevent climate change, while 26 percent think it should not, with the rest unsure. Just 28 percent, though, believe the U.S. has so far done more than most other countries to address climate change, with a third saying the country's record is about average, and 19 percent that it's done less than other nations. Nearly half -- 46 percent -- want the next president to do more than President Barack Obama has to combat global warming, while just 19 percent want the next president to do less." [HuffPost]
The partisan divide remains - Giovanni Russonello: "A solid majority of Americans say the United States should join an international treaty to limit the impact of global warming, but on this and other climate-related questions, opinion divides sharply along partisan lines, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions, but a slim majority of Republicans remain opposed….Seventy-five percent of Americans polled said that global warming was already having a serious environmental impact or would in the future. Nine in 10 Democrats agreed, compared with 58 percent of Republicans. One-third of Republicans said they believed it would never have much of an impact on the environment." [NYT]
DOES POLLING UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY? - Spurred by Jill Lepore’s lengthy examination of the state of election polling, the New York Times invited a range of contributors to address the question.
Do polls report public opinion or create it? - Sarah Igo: “Long before today’s epidemic of nonresponses and push polls, critics were poking holes in the notion that something as slippery as the popular will could be measured. If ‘public opinion’ existed at all, they were quite sure it would not manifest itself in the stable, clear and quantifiable form the polls favored.” George Bishop explains more: “If you build the questions, they will answer them. And that’s how pollsters -- unwittingly perhaps -- manufacture the ‘will of the people.’” [Igo, Bishop]
Do polls cover minority interests well enough? - Taeku Lee: “On representativeness, the typical poll today successfully interviews fewer than 1 in 10 targeted respondents, with racial minorities, noncitizens and persons without college degrees among the underrepresented. Moreover, in the conduct of surveys nonwhites are often likelier to be left out of a sample altogether. Telephone surveys reliant on landlines will miss those who use cell phones only; Internet surveys will miss those on the lower rungs of the digital divide; both examples involve Latinos and African-Americans. Many polls still interview only in English (and scarcely ever in Asian languages). Even if representativeness were achieved, polls properly mirror public opinion only when they ask about the concerns that are actually on people’s minds, concerns about which held views are firm and compelled to find voice. For a range of reasons concerns vital to minority voters rarely make the cut.” [Lee]
Are polls still a force for good? - Arthur Lupia: "Polls are a popular whipping-boy in politics. … If you think that polls are destroying democracy, then think about an alternative. Without polls, politicians, special interests and certain members of the news media would still have strong incentives to make forceful claims about the public’s views. Unconstrained by credible polling data, these individuals could spin incredible stories about the great public support for their endeavors. … Polls are imperfect. They always have been." [Lupia]
NUMBER OF LANDLINE HOUSEHOLDS CONTINUES TO DECLINE - Mike Stobbe: "Nearly half of U.S. households only use cellphones, according to new federal statistics that show more and more people are cutting the cord on landlines. Now, only about 8 percent of households have just landlines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.
More than 47 percent of American homes use only cellphones. About 42 percent have both. A dozen years ago, a mere 3 percent of U.S. households used only cellphones. Given the trend, officials believe more than half of U.S. homes will be wireless within the next year." [HuffPost]
More from the CDC: Of the 42 percent of households that have both landline and wireless access, 35 percent answer all or most calls on their cell phones, adding another 14.6 percent of the population that is wireless-mostly. That means 62 percent of Americans are either only reachable or primarily reachable via mobile phone. Among racial groups, Hispanics rely on mobile phones the most -- 59.2 percent are estimated to be wireless-only. By age, over two-thirds of Americans in the age categories 25-29 and 30-34 are wireless-only. [CDC]
CENSUS FUNDING REMAINS AN ISSUE - - Howard Fienberg, of the Marketing Research Association: "The funding picture for the Census Bureau is not looking so hot. The decennial Census and American Community Survey (ACS) provide the baseline for all research conducted in the U.S., without which private and public sector survey, opinion and marketing researchers could not develop statistically representative samples for any study. So we need the decennial headcount and the ACS to be as accurate and efficient as possible. Unfortunately, neither the House nor Senate have yet met the Obama Administration’s budget request for the Census Bureau of $1.5 billion for Fiscal Year 2016, including $663 million for the 2020 Census and $257 million for the ACS....The current Continuing Resolution funding the federal government expires on December 11, and Congress is expected to approve an omnibus funding bill by then that will include legislation funding Census programs." [MRA]
Why that matters - Alvin Chang: "These surveys are a way to gauge how the country is doing and a way to make decisions….Republicans have tried to defund the survey time and time again. But researchers argue it's important to count Americans this way because the ACS is the only survey of its kind. When agencies and nonprofits figure out how to spend their resources, the survey is about the only way they can get a bigger-picture view of the population they want to serve. If you want to find pockets of Korean-speaking populations across the US, the ACS is about the only way you can do that. If you want to develop a strategy to help families move off welfare in Michigan, you need the ACS." [Vox]
THIS WEEK'S POLLS
-Donald Trump leads with 36 percent nationally, followed by Ted Cruz at 16 percent. [CNN]
-Trump gains while Ben Carson fades in the GOP primary; Bernie Sanders defeats all Republicans in the general election. [Quinnipiac, HuffPost]
-Ted Cruz and Chris Christie get a boost in the New Hampshire primary. [PPP]
-Republicans gain a slight advantage in party preference, a shift from earlier this year. [Gallup]
-Americans vastly overestimate the percentage of immigrants and atheists living in the U.S. [Ipsos]
-Americans are far less annoyed by Christmas music than campaign ads. [HuffPost]
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THIS WEEK'S 'OUTLIERS' - Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:
-Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg says his party can't rely solely on demography in 2016. [WashPost]
-Steve Koczela shows that differences between online and live phone polls existed in 2012 too. [Commonwealth]
-Harry Enten argues Trump’s fate in the primaries might signal success or failure for web polling. [FiveThirtyEight]
-Millennials are less interested in entrepreneurship than they are in just having a stable job. [WashPost]
-An interactive simulation lets you tweak party preference and turnout rates to see how the state-by-state vote might go in 2016. [FiveThirtyEight]
-Almost half of Americans think new fathers should get paternity leave. [HuffPost]
-A study finds that the Republican donor class is abandoning their opposition to gay rights. [Slate]
-Republican pollsters Robert Blizzard and Neil Newhouse dismiss national primary polls as "mostly meaningless." [POS]
-Nate Cohn sees little hope for Ted Cruz to move beyond his "very conservative" base and capture more than just Iowa. [NYT]