I received a survey email from The White House today, forwarded to me by someone I care about who I am not going to name because unlike me, he/she does not blog for free in his/her jammies and I don’t want him/her to be judged as a proud endorser of my opinions.
The premise of the survey is that it will help DJT prepare for his address to Congress. The intro from the email states “We want to know what issues you want President Trump to focus on and your ideas for the future of our country.” OK, as a marketer, I am always down for a good survey and I always have a lot of ideas to share! They promised it would only take a couple of minutes of my time, however, it has ended up being a time drag, because I have given this little survey a lot of thought and then spent the time required to write about it. Here is the text of the first question in its entirety:
Which accomplishment(s) do you consider the most significant of the Trump Administration so far? Select All That Apply:
- Withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
- Reviving key job-creating energy projects such as the Keystone Pipeline
- Directing the Department of Defense to develop a plan to defeat ISIS
- Enacting regulatory reform to begin to dismantle Obama-era, job-killing regulations
- Implementing Executive Orders that focus on reducing crime, restoring public safety, dismantling transnational criminal organizations, and protecting our brave law enforcement officials
- Minimizing the burden of Obamacare, while clearing a path toward repeal and replace
- Creating the United States-Canada Council for Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders
- Negotiating with companies to bring thousands of jobs back to America
- Nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court
- Working with over 30 foreign leaders to discuss shared security concerns and solutions
The rest of the questions were more typical of a non-biased survey and there were spaces to “write your own response.”
As a person who has worked in marketing for 20 years, at first, I kind of laughed. I mean, really! Couldn’t someone in the White House figure out how to create a non-leading survey? But then I realized that the people who wrote this are probably at least as smart as I am. There was a reason for the way this survey was formulated.
This is a first step in crafting propaganda. Maybe you’ll get to see the result of this propaganda creation when DJT addresses a joint session of Congress on Feb 28, 2017! Here’s why I think this survey is constructed to provide propaganda, not facts.
1. The answers assume agreement and give you no option to disagree. If you think I am overreacting, here is the same question, but rephrased to be unflattering to the current Administration. If you support DJT, would you be able answer this question? PLEASE NOTE: I don’t necessarily think that any of these things are true – I am just making a point about bias in a survey.
Which accomplishment(s) do you consider the most ill-advised of the Trump Administration so far? Select All That Apply:
- Funding old-technology fossil fuel energy projects like the Keystone Pipeline instead of clean energy projects
- Creating a travel ban, based solely on religious-affiliation
- Enacting regulatory reform to begin to dismantle environmental protections that keep our air and water safe
- Implementing Executive Orders that focus on creating a more authoritative federal government
- Removing access to healthcare for low- and middle-income people
- Arguing with world leaders that have hitherto been firm allies of the United States of America
If you support DJT, do you feel annoyed that there was no choice you could actually make? Would you trust the data that comes out of this survey or would you know it didn’t represent people like you?
2. There is no “None of the Above” in any of the multiple choice questions. This is important because it is really easy to tabulate multiple choice answers and really hard to roll up “write your own” free response areas from a survey. Multiple choice answers are tabulated automatically and probably in real time. Free response needs actual people to read and analyze the responses to identify trends. If you take this survey and select multiple choice answers, you are giving the Administration the ability to claim that “100% of the respondents have something that they believe DJT is doing well.” What you probably won’t see in the reported results are the free response comments that are not flattering. What you won’t see are the numbers for the people who bail out of the survey because they do not have a response to choose that matches their views. If the White House really wanted to see what the people thought, at the very least, including a “None of the above” would have given them the ability to see how many people they are not reaching at all with their message.
I am willing to see data that shows that this is a standard practice by past White Houses because I honestly don’t know if this approach was used by past presidents. But I am a firm advocate of considering survey methodology for ANY DATA from ANY SIDE as we wade through what we can believe and what we should question. I especially question data that supports my views, because that is the easiest to believe.
Yes, this self-serving survey is a pretty minor issue in the realm of all of the issues we could talk about. I mean, how about that Oscar night SNAFU? But I would suggest that when you read any survey data, from any source, on any side of the political scale, spend a moment and check out the methodology. What did the questions actually say? Then decide for yourself if it is truly a non-biased request for information or if it is simply aimed at the spreading of information in support of a cause. Which is how vocabulary.com defines propaganda.