Mysterious Polls

From February 14 to May 6 (50 days), I read and wrote basic summaries of every presidential race related editorial in the Washington Post. One of my initial goals was to track opinion page themes, in hopes of finding a connection between WaPo tropes and actual public opinion. Specifically, I wanted to see a correlation between events and positive/negative coverage. After matching Op-Ed themes with head-to-head (McCain vs. Obama, Obama vs. Clinton, Clinton vs. McCain), Zogby, Gallup, AP and Rasmussen poll results, I found little correlation between public opinion results and Post coverage. What I did find was a heavy emphasis on “character” issues, and little emphasis on policy issues.

There were one major instance of poll activity correlating to opinion making. Obama’s numbers dipped in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright coverage, which hit the airwaves beginning on March 14. On March 17, Gallup tallied Clinton 47%, Obama 45%, and Obama 49%, McCain 47%. Two days later, after the story had gotten significant media attention, Gallup had Clinton 49%, Obama 42%, and McCain 47%, Obama 43%. Thus, began an onslaught of Wright questions in the Washington Post Op-Ed pages. From March 19 to the beginning of April, a whopping 10 out of the 21 presidential race focused editorials were devoted to the Reverend Wright issue.

A few factors may have fueled Wright pontificating in March. The new issue’s connection to race and boomer generation ‘culture wars’ was probably just plain interesting to many media members. Perhaps the negative poll bounce prompted some of the heavy Wright attention, and Obama may have attracted more coverage with his “A More Perfect Union” response speech.

The rationale for heavy early May “return of Wright coverage” makes little sense, though. The pastor made three few public appearances, and the Washington Post deemed it necessary to devote an astounding 8 out of 12 May 1- May 6 presidential editorials to this topic. This is odd because I found no evidence of a negative public reaction during or after the pastor’s April 26 PBS interview, or April 28 National Press Club speech. Obama still felt the need to “distance” himself from Wright, and did so in an April 29 speech. Obama’s poll numbers remained relatively stagnant immediately after the speech, and trended upwards in the following weeks.

As he came closer to mathematically eliminating Hillary Clinton, Obama’s poll prospects saw an uptick (The most recent polls show Obama beating Clinton by 7 points in the Gallup, 7 in the Rasmussen, and a whopping 16 in the Zogby). This is quite interesting for reasons I will get to in the second phase of my conclusions.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.