When Lukas Diaz said at his blog that the Dane County Council on Public Affairs lacked credibility (these are also the folks that brought you the baggy-pants hysteria from the Southwest side), I figured, eh, what’s new. But then, I had an opportunity to look into it more and wow. If the media had the information I just got, and still some like Channel 27 ran the story anyways, they too lack credibility, and ethics (or maybe staff to fact check their stories).
CREDIBILITY – CONSERVATIVE/REPUBLICAN FRONT GROUP
The first issue of credibility is who are the Dane County Council on Public Affairs. While they claim to be a non-partisan group and a voice for business, it is clear to those paying attention, they are just a Republican front group. The irony here is just precious:
“It is vital that policymakers understand what the public is thinking and what they want,” said Severson. “The views of the public often become lost in the debate clutter. Their opinion needs to count. And it’s vital that the public understands what citizens think rather than be told by politicians what they think,” Severson continued.
When you read below about how the fraudulent pollsters operate and look at the poll, you’ll find that these folks are trying to tell the politicians what people think in a special kind of way.
Additionally, they only endorsed the most conservative candidates for county board.
District 3 Elaine DeSmidt (I) vs Don Imhoff
District 4 Brett Hulsey (I) vs Greg Hull
District 7 Matt Veldran (I) vs Mike Thomsen
District 9 Dianne Hesselbein (I)
District 12 Paul Rusk (I) vs Rick Raulin
District 14 Melanie Hampton (I)
District 15 Barbara McKinney vs Ronn Ferrell (I)
District 16 Dave de Felice (I) vs Ryan Jennissen
District 18 Melissa Sargent vs Nancy Wild
District 19 Bill Clausius vs Steve Schwartzer
District 20 Gordon Shea vs Duane Gau (I)
District 21 Harvey Potter vs Dave Wiganowsky (I)
District 24 Robin Schmidt (I) vs Pat Barry
District 25 Eileen Bruskewitz (I)
District 26 Sharon Corrigan vs Joshua Gamer
District 27 Kyle Richmond (I) vs Jeff Kritch
District 28 Bob Green vs Kurt Schlicht (I)
District 29 Dave Ripp (I)
District 30 Patrick Downing (I) vs Don Steinhauer
District 31 Gerald Jensen (I)
District 32 Mike Willett (I)
District 33 Sam Cooke vs Jack Martz (I)
District 35 Denise Duranczyk (I) vs Dave Siitari
District 36 Cynda Solberg (I)
District 37 Bob Salov (I)
Out of the 25 endorsements, they endorsed three people endorsed by the Dane Dems, 2 (Hesselbein and Hampton) unopposed. Corrigan was the third.
Of the 19 endorsements the conservative Chamber of Commerce endorsed, 13 of them match up with this group.
CREDIBILITY – FRAUDULENT POLLSTERS
The second issue with credibility is the survey. Lukas Diaz does a good job finding out about the reputation of the pollsters, Strategic Vision LLC. He has several links to various stories. They lack so much credibility the American Association of Public Opinion Research says they violated the Code of Professional Ethics and Practices. Google Strategic Vision LLC and fraud and you find much more and this is the company that did the research. So, I looked at the research a little further.
QUESTIONING THE POLL
The demographics of the people surveyed is off from the general population by pretty amazing amounts, here’s a couple examples:
Age
Dane County population 65 and over: 9.7%
Survey: 32.6%
And 40% of those surveyed were retired.
Zip Code
The listed the zip codes with the highest response rates. When you look at that, compared to where the population by zip code is in Dane County, there are 4 zip codes (53703, 53703, 53713, 53719) that have more than 5% of the population, all in the City of Madison that are not in the top ten zip codes that were surveyed. And yet a couple zip codes with less than 2% of the population made it in the top ten zip codes. Cottage Grove (53527) has 2% of the Dane County population but have 7.7% of the responses. Mt Horeb (53572) has 1.9% of the population and 4.9% of the vote. My guess is this skewed the responses to more conservative responses.
Homeowners
I’m not sure this matters as much and to some extent might be reflective of the zip codes they concentrated with, but its also off quite a bit, also not reflecting the Dane County population.
Dane County homeownership: 57.6%
Survey: 78%
Republicans/Conservatives
Somehow, they managed to find 38% people who identify themselves as conservative or somewhat conservative and only 31% as liberal. Does that sound like Dane County to you?
Funny Results
More humorous to me is that despite their skewed or fraudulent results, they still came up with results that show:
– 60% of the respondents oppose freezing conservation land purchases
– less than 35% want the RTA to be elected
– only 55% oppose a “tax increase for transit only”
– Over 80% believe the quality of life in Dane County is excellent or good.
– About only 25% of people are concerned about the 911 center
These are all conservative talking points where you would have expected to do better with a larger chunk of their base.
Here’s the full survey if you want to take a look for yourself. I’m sure you could find some other things to point out.
Here’s how they try to justify that its statistically valid:
The Dane County Council of Public Affairs commissioned the 2010 Sounding Board Survey, an opinion survey providing a statistically valid presentation of the views or temperature of likely Dane County, Wisconsin spring voters. A total of 950 completed interviews were obtained. This provides statistical significance more than sufficient for decision-making purposes. The margin of error for this survey was +/- 3.7%.
For this poll, Strategic Vision, LLC conducted phone interviews of a random sample of Dane County, Wisconsin voters from its call center. Interviews were conducted from March 12 -20, 2010. Respondents were asked whether they had voted in 2006, 2008 elections and were planning to vote in the next election in 2010. Respondents who satisfied all three of these criteria were classified as likely voters and were included in the survey. Respondents who either did not vote in 2006 or 2008, or were not likely to vote in 2010 were not included. A total of 17, 109 numbers were dialed. Out of this number, 11, 621 connections were made. Ten thousand six hundred and seventy-one connections did not qualify, refused to answer the survey or terminated the survey
CONCLUSION
I’m always skeptical of polls, because so much depends on how the questions are asked and who actually answers the questions, but this was a much bigger problem than I thought it would be. Like I said, I wasn’t too surprised they lacked credibility, but I was a little more surprised by how blatant it was.
