That "Poll Asked" Look

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the latest FOX News poll shows overwhelming opposition to Obamacare. Nate Silver is on the case.

The first instinct that most of the liberals in the audience will have simply this: well, it's a Fox poll, so of course it's biased. The reality is a little bit more complicated, however. Fox News's pollster, Opinion Dynamics, generally hasn't shown much evidence of a Republican-leaning "house effect". Take a look, for example, at their Obama approval numbers. Since the beginning of Obama's term, they have shown, on average, 58 percent of registered voters approving the President versus 32 percent disapproval. This is, if anything, generous to Obama, as the average non-Fox polls has shown 57 percent approval and 37 percent disapproval over this interval.

The next suspect would ordinarily be the question wording. But Fox News's question is perfectly fine:

Based on what you know about the health care reform legislation being considered right now, do you favor or oppose the plan?

No bias that I can detect there. The question is slightly unusual in that it mentions neither "Congress" nor "Obama" nor "the Democrats", but it's not unusual in a biased way. If anything, the question is particularly unbiased -- it looks to me that support for health care improves slightly if Obama's name is mentioned, but goes down slightly if Congress is mentioned instead. Fox escapes this problem by simply phrasing things in the passive voice and not mentioning either institution.

So how can Fox News ask a seemingly unbiased question of a seemingly unbiased sample and come up with what seems to be a biased result?

Good question. FOX News certainly has an agenda, folks. So how do they push it without making it look obvious? This FOX News poll is a good 15-20 points off the most recent averages.

The answer? By making it look only somewhat obvious, of course.

The answer may have to do with the questions Fox asks before the question on health care. This weekend, for example, Fox News put out a separate release with their health care questions -- but the health care questions weren't asked separately. Instead, they were questions #27-35 of their larger, national poll, which you can find here. And what were some of those questions? Here are a few:

3. Do you think Barack Obama's travel and speaking schedule makes him look more like he is a candidate on the campaign trail or more like he is the president of the United States?

4. Do you think President Obama apologizes too much to the rest of the world for past U.S. policies?

5. Do you think the Obama administration is proposing more government spending than American taxpayers can afford, or not?

6. Do you think the size of the national debt is so large it is hurting the future of the country?

7. Would you rather: [ROTATE OPTIONS 1 and 2]
Cut spending now so future generations don't have to pay
Keep spending at current levels and let future generations pay

20. When Barack Obama was a candidate campaigning for the presidency, he spoke of the urgent need to finish the fight in Afghanistan, which he called the central front on the war on terrorism. Do you think that, as president, Obama is doing what it takes to win in Afghanistan?

These questions run the gamut slightly leading to full-frontal Republican talking points. Some of them, such as question #3, are almost literally rhetorical questions, which are never good things to have on a poll. And no, you can rest assured that Fox News was not asking questions formed from comparably biased Democratic talking points.

A respondent who hears these questions, particularly the series of questions on the national debt, is going to be primed to react somewhat unfavorably to the mention of another big Democratic spending program like health care. And evidently, an unusually high number of them do.

It's not the health care questions that are biased, it's the rest of the poll questions leading up to it. Clever...but not clever enough, apparently. Only makes FOX News look even more like a bunch of tools.