Posted by
Defend America on Saturday, February 13, 2010 5:32:26 PM
By Stuart Rothenberg
I’ll admit it. I like numbers.
Whether
the number is a WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) when
evaluating a baseball pitcher, a price-to-earnings ratio when
evaluating a stock or a job approval when considering an incumbent’s
re-election prospects, I rely on numbers to allow me to make
comparisons and, often, projections for the future.
But some
numbers don’t tell the whole story, even when they come from one of the
most prestigious and widely cited public opinion organizations in the
world, Gallup.
About a week ago, Gallup released a report on
party identification in the states. Nationally, the respected polling
firm found Democrats with an 8-point advantage, 49 percent to 41
percent, down from a 12-point advantage in 2008.
The change in
attitudes from 2008 to 2009 isn’t surprising, since the GOP probably
bottomed out with President Barack Obama’s election. Still, Gallup’s
aggregate data are useful, especially when examining changes in party
identification over a long period of time.
The troubling part of
the report, “Party ID: Despite GOP Gains, Most States Remain Blue,”
came for me when Gallup characterized the strength of the two major
political parties in each of the 50 states, too often leading readers
to some misleading conclusions.
Gallup assigned states to one of
five categories — Strong Democrat, Lean Democrat, Competitive, Lean
Republican, Strong Republican — based on the self-identified
partisanship of more than 350,000 adults nationwide.
The states
that have become partisan bastions — for example, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts and Maryland on the Democratic side, and Wyoming, Utah
and Idaho for the GOP — aren’t surprising. Other characterizations are,
well, bizarre.
Gallup found self-identification in South
Carolina at 42.8 percent Democratic and 42.3 percent Republican, for a
Democratic advantage of one-half of 1 point. That makes the Palmetto
State “competitive” according to Gallup’s system of classification.
That
may indeed be the way people in South Carolina identify themselves by
party, but it isn’t the way they vote. The state has two GOP Senators,
a Republican governor and four Republican Congressmen, compared with
two Democrats. The last Democratic nominee for president to carry the
state was Jimmy Carter in 1976 (before most of the South had
realigned), and in 2008, Republicans won large majorities in both
chambers of the South Carolina Legislature.
http://rothenbergpoliticalreport.blogspot.com/2010/02/it-all-depends-on-meaning-of-party.html