Here’s the one big thing the polls get wrong about Americans’ support for political violence
If you’ve been paying attention to the polls lately, you’ve probably noticed some unsettling conclusions about the ranks of Americans who say political violence is justified or they’re willing to support the use of force for political ends.
The problem, according to one Ohio State political science professor? They’re wrong.
And that has a lot to do with the way the questions are being asked, Ryan Kennedy , the university’s Timashev Chair of Data Analytics, wrote in a recent analysis for the public policy site The Conversation .
In Pollingese, the culprit is something known as a “response error,” which means respondents end up interpreting a question differently from the way that researchers think they will.
As a result, the answers that researchers get "don’t really reflect what the researcher thinks the answers show," Kennedy wrote.
Here’s an example: According to Kennedy, asking someone whether they’d support using force to achieve a political goal raises the question of what a polling respondent thinks “use of force” means in that context.
It could mean, for instance, using guns. But it also could mean using the courts to “force” someone to do something, he observed.
Big, big difference.
“Such response errors have been a concern for pollsters ever since survey research began ," he wrote. “They can affect even seemingly straightforward questions.”
To get around that problem, Kennedy used artificial intelligence to ask some of the same questions and to ask respondents what they were thinking when they were asked those questions. The AI also generated reports based on the responses, Kennedy wrote.
For instance, when Democrats were asked about using force to remove President Donald Trump from office, more than half (57%) of the 33% who agreed with that sentiment said they were thinking he might “’need to be ‘fired’ or forced out of office due to rules or laws,’" Kennedy wrote.
Nearly 3 in 10 (29%) of Republicans told Kennedy they agreed that using military force was justified to stop protests against Trump’s agenda, according to Kennedy.
But “almost all of the respondents who agreed with this statement envisioned the National Guard interceding nonviolently to stop violent protests and riots,” he wrote.
Only about 2.6% of Republicans said they supported using the military against nonviolent protests, he wrote.
And “almost all those who agreed that use of the military was justified expressed thoughts like this: ‘I see the military coming and acting as a police force to stop or prevent the demonstrations that become violent. Peaceful protesters must be allowed to exercise their right to free speech,’” Kennedy wrote.
The bottom line?
“Americans almost universally condemn the recent political violence they have witnessed,” he wrote. “The recent poll results showing otherwise more likely stem from confusion about what the questions are asking than actual support for political violence.”
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