Col. Mustard Gets That Poll Asked Look

Today's Col. Mustard harrumphing is a long diatribe against Monday's Public Policy Polling survey that found that in a rematch of the November election, Wisconsin Republican Scott Walker would have lost the Governor's race to Democrat Tom Barrett.  The good Colonel is vexed by what he calls a "clear bias" in the poll's sample:

The people answering the poll identified themselves as evenly split in how they voted last November, 47-47:


But the actual results in the election were in favor of Walker 52.3-46.5, as this chart from The New York Times shows.  

Also, he complains that in addition to under-sampling Walker voters, PPP over-sampled union households.   That's the crux of the argument, but that's assuming that there were no union voters that voted for Scott Walker, and that's a pretty huge assumption as Jensen pointed out.

It's actually Republicans, more so than Democrats or independents, whose shifting away from Walker would allow Barrett to win a rematch if there was one today. Only 3% of the Republicans we surveyed said they voted for Barrett last fall but now 10% say they would if they could do it over again. That's an instance of Republican union voters who might have voted for the GOP based on social issues or something else last fall trending back toward Democrats because they're putting pocketbook concerns back at the forefront and see their party as at odds with them on those because of what's happened in the last month.

Pretty sure that doesn't have anything to do with oversampling of Democrats.  But what about union households?  Well, answer there is pretty convincing too.

Key on both of those questions about rights for public employees is that a majority of both union and non-union households stand with the workers on those issues. Union households support collective bargaining by a 70/26 margin, but non-union households do as well by a narrower 51/42 margin. Union households think public employees should have as many or more rights than they do now by a 66/32 spread, but so do non-union households by a 51/45 one.

Huh.  Well, kinda kills that complaint.  Americans are behind the unions...even the non-union workers.