Note the wording that Marquette chose to use in their poll.
Which is more important to you: keeping the gas tax and vehicle registration fees where they are now or raising the gas tax and registration fees to increase spending on roads and highways?And 57% chose "keep taxes and fees where they are now." So these people don’t want the state's roads fixed? I highly doubt that.
Which is why I'd be very interested what the responses to that question might be if it was preceded with questions like this “How do you rate the condition of your roads?” and “Do you think more spending should be needed on the state’s roads and highways?” Or if people were asked "should the state continue with the same level of road repair for the next two years, if it means taxes and fees stay at the same level?"
All of these outcomes will be a direct result of not raising the gas tax or fees, but Marquette didn't ask about those outcomes. Sure, people don’t like the idea of paying higher taxes and fees, but they'll back them when they recognize the cost of inaction is more and something needs to be done. I would think fixing the roads would be a higher priority than keeping taxes/fees low for most Wisconsinites, but that binary choice wasn’t given.
Likewise, a Bradley Foundation front group put out a poll that indicated Wisconsinites actually liked the state’s voucher program. Here’s the “proof” from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL).
The next section of our poll asked about support for Wisconsin’s parental choice programs. First, we asked respondents, “School voucher programs provide a state-funded payment to families for their children to attend a private school. Generally speaking, do you support or oppose the concept of school voucher programs?” In the aggregate, a plurality of registered voters support the state’s voucher programs. Approximately 45% expressed support compared with about 38% who expressed opposition.Know what’s not mentioned in that poll? The actual way vouchers are funded in Wisconsin outside of Milwaukee.
Topline Voucher Support
Strongly Support 19.71%
Support 25.00% (Sum Support: 44.72%)
Neither 12.07%
Oppose 17.50%
Strongly Oppose 20.93% (Sum Oppose: 38.43%)
Looking at the cross tabs below, support is highest among strong Republicans (henceforth in charts “GOP”). Also crossing the 50% support threshold are African American respondents, Republican respondents overall and leaners, Hispanic respondents, and those living in southeast Wisconsin.
And while the WILL/Bradley poll asks about Evers’ plans “to increase spending by $1.4 billion on Wisconsin’s public schools,” they don’t mention the $369 million that state taxpayers are slated to send to vouchers within 2 years, and the $193 million TAKEN AWAY from local public school districts to pay for most of those vouchers. Think the support for vouchers would be lower if Wisconsinites were reminded how many dollars were being given to teach students in religious schools, and that those "Jesus rode a dinosaur" schools get more state aid per student than public schools get?
By the way, that WILL poll is clearly not intended to be used as actual data that might instruct policy, but instead to see what messaging the Bradleys and the DeVoses can have their WisGOP puppets try to sell when it comes to the voucher scam. Nice “charity” work, isn’t it?
The point here is that people view issues differently based on what information they are given, and how a certain issue is portrayed. This isn’t a ground-breaking statement, but it’s remarkable to me how Party Democrats don’t think about this nearly as much as Republicans and GOP puppetmasters do. You need to be out ahead of these guys, pre-empt their (very flawed and slanted) arguments and be as relentless as they are.
Being nice, appealing to reason and leaving it up to the individual isn’t going to work when the other guys are lying, spinning and propagandizing their side all the time. You have to lay the groundwork and hammer reality into the head of the everyday person to see what is obvious to anyone who is honest on the issue. Otherwise they won’t know, and fall victim to the “have your cake and eat it, too” narratives of the Bradleys and the WisGOPs.
Because often when it comes to framing issues, it's not just what is being talked about, but what ISN'T brought up. The Bradleys know this well, and that's why they had their polls use choices on key issues that would make it more likely to appear that Wisconsinites would get behind the regressive agenda that was rejected at the ballot box statewide last November.
PS- The State Journal's Phil Hands with another great cartoon with the question the MU Law Poll didn't askdiv4
I don't know how the demographics stack up in other versions of the Marquette poll, but the most recent seems to undersample minorities. Per U.S. Census Bureau (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/wi) the racial composition of the state is as follows: white alone, 86.3%; black or African American alone, 6.7%; Native American, 1.2 %; Asian alone, 2.9%; Native hawaiian or other Pacific islander, 0.1%; two or more races, 1.9%; Hispanic or Latino, 6.9%; white alone, not Hispanic or Latino, 81.3%. Marquette shows 87% white, 4% black, 3% Hispanic, 4% other, 1% DK/NA/Ref. in their summary statistics, and 89% white, 4% black, 1% Asian/S Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% > 1 race, 1% Hispanic/Latino, 1% refused in this specific survey. Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteThey create a universe based on past voting history. I've often thought it's too conservative vs past exit polling, but given history and the bad turnout totals with people of color in 2016, it's not out of line to me.
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