That Immigration Speech Instant Reaction Poll

Instant Reaction Polls Legacy blog posts President Bush

dHere is a less than instant reaction to an instant-reaction survey fielded Monday night following the immigration address by President George Bush.  CNN conducted the survey (story, results) among Americans who reported viewing the immigration speech by President George Bush.  The survey showed 79% of debate speech viewers expressing a positive reaction, only 18% with a negative reaction.  This spurred John Podhoretz of the National Review Online (via Kaus) to crow:

Unless this CNN poll was an outlier, last night was anything but undramatic. It was a grand slam for President Bush. You can’t do better than having 79 percent thinking favorably of your speech on a divisive issue, and a 25 percent jump in support for your policies.

Actually, as data on comparable surveys show, this speech was an outlier and you can do better.  The survey, conducted by CNN’s new survey partner the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) appears to use the same basic methodology and an indentical question as used by Gallup in previous speech reaction surveys.   Here are the reactions of the speech audience – using precisely the same questions – to the last eight State of the Union addresses:

The positive reaction to the Bush speech (79%) was lower than what President’s Bush and Clinton received in all but two of their last eight SOTU addresses, and the “very positive” (40%) score was lower than all eight.   Not surprisingly, the partisanship of the immigration speech audience was heavily Republican – 41% Republican, 23% Democrat – a result in line with the Republican skew of recent Bush SOTU addresses.  I wrote about these issues in more depth back in January here, here and here

Also of note, on Tuesday, the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza devoted his Parsing the Polls feature to a discussion of the merits of instant reaction polls.  Cillizza gathered comments from Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center, Mike Traugott of the University of Michigan and the Post’s own Claudia Deane.   It’s worth a click.

And yes, most of the caution about putting to much faith in instant reactions also applies to our recent obsession with polls on the NSA phone records issues.  Keep in mind, however, that a survey of speech watchers can be especially misleading because fans of the President tend to make up a disproportionate share of the audience.

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.