The Washington Post's bad poll question on filibusters

I don't say this often, but James Taranto is right -- the much-touted Washington Post poll showing overwhelming opposition to getting rid of the filibuster for judicial nominations is deeply flawed:

The Post's Phony Poll
"Filibuster Rule Change Opposed" is the headline of the lead story in today's Washington Post. The paper reports on a poll of 1,007 "randomly selected adults." The results are here (PDF), and the relevant questions are No. 34 and No. 36, which appear on page 13 (both, for some reason, after No. 35):

34. The Senate has confirmed 35 federal appeals court judges nominated by Bush, while Senate Democrats have blocked 10 others. Do you think the Senate Democrats are right to block these nominations? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

Result: Right 48% (22% strongly, 26% somewhat), wrong 36% (17% strongly, 19% somewhat). Here's the other question:

36. Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees?

Results: Support 26%, oppose 66%.

Read these questions carefully and you'll see that the Post's headline is false. The poll not only doesn't use the word filibuster; it doesn't even describe the procedure. The way the question is worded, the Democrats could have "blocked" the nominations by the normal method of voting them down--and there is no reason to think that "randomly selected adults" would have been paying enough attention to know the difference. (Tellingly, the poll asks how closely participants have been following the Tom DeLay kerfuffle--only 36% say even "somewhat" closely--but does not ask the same question about the judge issue.)

The introduction to the question should have been worded: ". . . Senate Democrats have used a procedure called the filibuster to block a vote on 10 others." As it is, this poll is either a very sloppy bit of work or a deliberate attempt to mislead the Post's readers--including members of the U.S. Senate.

The New York Times picks up on this point of view in its filibuster story today, but attributes criticism to "Republicans":

Republicans argued that the questions were biased, in that the rule change was described in the poll as "changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush's judicial nominees" rather than referring to the need for a simple majority vote.

Why not call some polling experts? This is the laziest sort of "he said"/"she said" reporting. The question is indisputably bad. If you don't mention or explain the filibuster, the results can't possibly be valid.

Update 5/3: The People for the American Way Foundation claimed in an email to supporters that the question proves that public support for the filibuster has increased:

In the four weeks since PFAW Foundation launched our national public education campaign through TV ads and grassroots organizing, support for the filibuster and opposition to the "nuclear option" has increased 20 percentage points!

But the question has never been asked before in the same form. There's no reason to think public opinion has changed substantially. PFAW is just misleading their membership.

Comments

[brent]

I'm no journalistic ethicist, and I've wondered for a while what is the right thing to do in this situation:

A collegue publishes a story that makes Republicans look bad. I start receiving unsolicited phone calls from Republican operatives telling me why the story is unfounded. I'm asked to write a story on the topic. I begin to research the operatives' claims and find them reasonable.

The dilemma is subtle: if I write "My collegue's story is unfounded because...", haven't I given in to the political pressure from the Republican operatives? If I write "Republicans claim that my collegue's story is unfounded because...", aren't I playing in to he said/she said crapfest? But the latter is more accurate to my experience, and the former smacks of non-independence. But the former is more fact-based and the latter is just gossipy.

I dunno. I don't know, but I bet there's a lot of this sort of pondering going on.