So if you ever wanted to know how the polling industry works in line with US foreign policy thinktanks to generate public messaging - well, here is a bewildering example:
Here is the entire quote:
Shibley Telhami: Let’s look at the next slide um which is what is “your impression of the performance of the following parties in the Ukraine war” and this is about Russia is failing and Ukraine is uh succeeding. Let me tell you why - we have this measure, of course the public doesn’t really know whether Russia is is failing or succeeding, but the the public forms a perception, based on the coverage from the Press, what politicians say - um what the Ukrainians say, what the Russians say, and that impression we found throughout our polling, to be highly correlated with the degree of support. The more they think Russia is failing, the more they want to support Ukraine, the more they think Ukraine is succeeding, the more they want to support Ukraine. So those two measures about Russia failing and Ukraine succeeding have been essential. So to the extent that there is a change here, it is interesting not in the overall, because when you look at the total public uh all respondents there’s no change within the margin of error, the changes within the margin of error, but there is a bit of a troubling shift within Democrats. So if you look at yeah um uh you know drop from 48 to 43% about Russia is failing and a big drop in Ukraine is succeeding uh from 39 to 31% in September to October and then one final slide I’ll show before I ask you to react - which is a question that we only asked this time, because it was about the counter offensive we knew actually in the spring, that a lot of people were expecting a counter expensive to see um, what - how it impacts you know the the calculus of people in terms of success of failure of Ukraine. And I was obviously -- initially people were hopeful that the counter offensive was going to be more successful, it it seemed to have bogged down maybe more than people were expecting, uh before at least, the public, but surprisingly it’s not uh as bad as I may have expected, because actually it looks like a plurality of the public, 38%, say been somewhat effective, only 5% say very ineffective and 9% say somewhat ineffective, so obviously a lot of don’t knows that you expect a question like that about 30%, but - you know the perception about the counter offensive is more - that it’s more successful than not successful, including among Republicans -- so that’s interesting and and obviously promising from the point of view of supporting Ukraine.
Any reactions you had?
Fiona Hill: Yeah there’s a number of reactions and I mean I know that you you know delve into a lot of the details in this I mean you just said yourself that a lot of it is shared by whatever people are hearing politicians say and that might you know, very well you know, um uh I think um underlined some of the you know issues and differences between Republicans and Democrats, obviously given you know the the fact that we’re right in the middle now of um our presidential election campaign and this has become a domestic political issue just like you know we already said it is in Poland, or has been in Slovakia and you know in Hungary and you know elsewhere where you know inevitably this is part of the fabric of uh politics -- also in the media, I mean you know um there is a lot of um selectivity in the way that um this is covered by uh different organizations some um newspapers that people are reading have corresponds on the ground, others get it from wire feeds, a lot of people particularly in younger generations, and I know that you’ve got some kind of age bracket, you know getting their information from YouTube and Instagram, you know…
Yeah, never mind that the majority of people polled in the US got both of those questions wrong - just - well, just comment that the fact that they did is -- obviously promising from the point of view of supporting Ukraine.
There is this saying in the polling industry, that its not the results of the polls that are telling about societies preferences, its the changing of the numbers.
So nevermind, that more people got this wrong than right, the important part is that this looks “obviously promising from the point of view of supporting Ukraine”.
This (the strong correlation part) is then used to craft the public narrative, which media mostly just copies, at least, when it comes from the Brookings Institution, which is being briefed here.
The correlation in itself is not that astonishing here (people treat wars like a sports event), its more the blasé attitute in which “having a public that gets all of this objectively wrong” can be “obviously promising from the point of view of supporting Ukraine”.
So, that more people on the democratic side got this right, is talked about as a problem, because the numbers fell.
Diese Gesellschaft ist das absolut grotesk und abartigst Allerletzte.
