Corzine Job Approval: A Tale of Two Offices

About two months ago, I was part of a group from Leadership New Jersey that had the opportunity to meet with Governor Corzine’s chief-of-staff, Brad Abelow. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the governor’s highly unpopular fiscal restructuring plan and state budget proposal.

The Chief said that the governor has taken unpopular positions in the past and stood by them regardless of what happened to his poll ratings. Fair enough. But then Abelow said something curious – well, curious to a pollster. He asserted (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) that the all-time biggest drop in Jon Corzine’s job approval came during his U.S. Senate term, after he voted against authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

I didn’t have Corzine’s senate career ratings memorized, but given recent events in his gubernatorial career, I was sure that wasn’t right. So, in our never-ending pursuit of the “Real Numbers,” I looked it up. Any way you slice it, the movement in Senator Corzine’s voter approval is nothing compared to what’s happened to Governor Corzine’s ratings this year.

According to the latest Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll, Governor Corzine has an upside down job rating among New Jersey registered voters – 36% approve to 53% disapprove. [Note: I’m using registered voters as the base in this analysis so the trend is consistent across polls.]

Corzine ended 2007 with a +3 net rating, or 46% approve to 43% disapprove according to the Quinnipiac Poll (see tables below for full trend). That dropped to a net –4 rating in the Monmouth/Gannett poll released January 16, 2008 – the week after he announced his toll road/fiscal restructuring plan. The governor then embarked on a series of town hall meetings to sell the plan, but by late February his ratings had dropped even further to a net –15. [An interesting side note: While the governor’s job rating declined during this period, opinion on the toll road plan itself did not budge (for details).] And two weeks after the governor announced his austere budget proposal, his approval dipped even further to a net –21.

In sum, from December 2007 to March 2008, Governor Corzine’s net job rating dropped a full 24 points. Specifically, his job approval declined from 46% to 34%, while his job disapproval increased from 43% to 55%.

Now, let’s turn to Brad Abelow’s assertion. Senator Jon Corzine’s job rating in September 2002, the month prior to his vote against the Iraq war resolution, was 47% approve to 19% disapprove – or a net +28 job rating (courtesy of Quinnipiac). This is fairly consistent with his job rating throughout 2002.

Senator Corzine’s job approval in December 2002 – his first public poll rating after the war vote – was a net +25 rating (47% approve to 22% disapprove), a nearly negligible change. To be fair to the governor’s chief-of-staff, though, we should look to the time of the actual conflict. After the Iraq war commenced in March 2003, Jon Corzine’s approval rating did indeed decline – to a net +17 (46% to 29%). It bottomed out at 44% to 30% in June (and again in November) of that year, before his approvals climbed into the 50s by August 2004.

Jon Corzine’s job rating as senator dropped 14 net points from September 2002 to June 2003. It’s also worth noting that President Bush’s net job rating among New Jersey voters (again, courtesy Quinnipiac) also declined by a similar 15 points during the exact same period – from +34 in September (64% to 30%) to +19 in June (58% to 39%). So, it’s not really clear whether it was specifically Corzine’s vote against the Iraq war or a general reaction against Washington that was responsible for the decline in his senatorial job rating.

In any event, Senator Corzine’s job approval never dropped below 44% and his disapproval never topped 30%. This is a far cry from where Governor Corzine’s job approval stands today, with a clear majority of voters who disapprove and a net rating that is now 20 points lower than it was at the start of the year.

What are the possible implications in today’s political climate? Well, if Congressman Rob Andrews thinks calling for change is a good primary strategy against a U.S. Senator with a +17 net job rating (48% approve to 31% disapprove of Frank Lautenberg’s performance), imagine how that change message may play out against a gubernatorial incumbent with a net –17 job rating.

Governor Corzine Job Approval (among registered voters)

Date	Approve	Disapprove	N/A	Net Approval
4/30/08 *	36%	53%	11%	-17
3/9/08 *	34%	55%	11%	-21
2/26/08: Announces budget proposal
2/20/08 **	37%	52%	12%	-15
1/12/08 to 2/11/08: Holds town hall meetings
1/16/08 *	42%	46%	12%	-4
1/8/08: Announces fiscal restructuring plan
12/11/07 **	46%	43%	11%	+3
10/7/07 *	47%	34%	19%	+13
9/25/07 **	49%	40%	11%	+9
7/22/07 *	46%	36%	17%	+10
7/9/07 **	48%	39%	13%	+9
4/19/07 *	52%	30%	17%	+22
4/18/07 *	51%	36%	13%	+15
4/12/07: Auto accident
2/28/07 **	50%	34%	16%	+16
2/19/07: Announces state worker contract
2/18/07 *	44%	36%	20%	+8
1/24/07 **	42%	42%	16%	+0
Source: * Monmouth/Gannett;  ** Quinnipiac

Senator Corzine Job Approval (among registered voters)

Date	Approve	Disapprove	N/A	Net Approval
11/12/03	44%	30%	26%	+14
9/24/03	48%	30%	22%	+18
6/18/03	44%	30%	26%	+14
4/2/03	46%	29%	25%	+17
March 2003: Iraq war starts
1/29/03	47%	23%	30%	+24
12/11/02	47%	22%	30%	+25
October 2002: Iraq war resolution vote
9/12/02	47%	19%	33%	+28
8/8/02	49%	19%	31%	+30
4/24/02	48%	20%	32%	+28
1/30/02	51%	15%	33%	+36
Source: all from Quinnipiac Poll

New Jersey’s New Partisan Landscape

The presidential primary has created a sea change in party registration in New Jersey. The Monmouth University Polling Institute has been closely tracking turnout in the February 5th contest and now has preliminary data from 13 counties which questions prior assumptions about party identification in the state.

Many political observers use party registration as a guide to the partisan divisions in an electorate. In New Jersey, this can lead to a mischaracterization of the electorate – and some bad polling (more on that below).
New Jersey does not require party declarations when a person registers to vote. Nor does the state require unaffiliated voters who wish to vote in a primary to make an early declaration of which party’s primary they want to take part in. These voters can just show up on primary day and choose a party before stepping into the voting booth.

Registered Democrats and Republicans are stuck with their primary choice (unless they contact their county clerk a few months ahead of time to change their party affiliation). Anecdotal evidence from this year’s presidential primary indicate that a number of New Jersey voters showed up intending to vote in one party’s primary, but did not recall voting in the other party’s primary some years ago and were now stuck with that choice. Our own polling suggests that between 2% and 5% of voters cast ballots in the primary of the party opposite their original intent. This makes being an unaffiliated voter an attractive option in New Jersey.

New Jersey’s party registration has been fairly consistent for the past decade or so. On average, about 24% of the state’s voters are registered as Democrats, 18% as Republicans, and 58% as independents or unaffiliated voters – a 6 point advantage for the Dems. (Just a handful – about 1,600 out of 4.8 million – are registered with a third party).

At the same time, recent polling on New Jersey voters’ partisan identity has also remained fairly consistent, after trending more Democratic through the 1990s. Our most recent Monmouth Poll from March 2008 shows the party ID split (“In politics today, do you consider yourself…”) at 40% Democrat, 26% Republican, and 33% independent – a 14 point Democratic advantage. Obviously, a lot of voters who are registered unaffiliated claim a partisan identity. So which is part indicator is right?

Well, bottom line, party registration and partisan identity are not the same thing. As Charlie Cook puts it: “[T]he real jaw dropper is when independents are asked which party they lean toward. This is important because historically, independents who lean toward a party tend to vote almost as consistently for that party as those who identify themselves with the party. There are just some people who like to call themselves independents but, functionally speaking, are really partisans.”

In New Jersey, a significant number of unaffiliated voters have a partisan leaning. However, the state’s dearth of high-interest, competitive primaries means that those voters find little need to publicly declare their affiliation.

A number of pollsters use party registration numbers as a way to re-weight their data to “improve” the partisan representation of their results. In New Jersey, that means weighting up independent voters to 58% of the survey sample. That’s not a smart move. There just aren’t that many truly “independent” voters in the state.

The results of the February 5 vote bear this out. This year’s presidential contest generated extraordinarily high turnout for a primary in New Jersey – 35% of all registered voters participated. This is double the percentage who voted in the 2000 primaries and is even higher than the 32% who voted in the November 2007 general election for state legislature. A total of 1,141,199 votes were cast in the Democratic primary and 566,201 on the Republican side. This represents 97% of all registered Democrats and 65% of registered GOP voters. Those kinds of turnout percentages are dubious. Clearly, quite a few unaffiliated voters showed up to vote as well.

The Monmouth University Polling Institute staff have been in contact with election boards and county clerks in all 21 counties to determine how many unaffiliated voters showed up on February 5. To date, we have received responses from 13. (Interestingly, most of the large Democratic counties have not yet completed their counts.)

We are able to draw some tantalizing, if tentative, inferences from the data we have received so far. First, it appears that just under half of the Democratic electorate on February 5 was unaffiliated. In the Republican primary, the number of unaffiliateds was about 1-in-3. And because participating in a primary automatically registers the voter with that party, there are now a lot more partisan voters on the election rolls. With the caveat that most of the big Democratic counties have yet to report their unaffiliated turnout, we estimate that the official voter registration figures released in the next month will show New Jersey party registration standing approximately at 34% Democrat, 21% Republican, and 45% unaffiliated – a 13 point Democratic registration advantage.

This new party configuration also affects political characterizations in a number of counties. For example, Burlington County has gone from an even party split to an 8 point Democratic registration edge. In Somerset County, the Republican’s 8 point registration advantage has been reduced to a single point. Both of these counties will be embroiled in hotly contested Congressional races this fall. The biggest gain among the 13 counties who reported thus far is in Mercer, where the Dems increased their advantage from 12 to 23 points.
So what does this portend for the June primaries this year – with contested U.S. Senate nominations in both parties and a couple of open House seats up for grabs? Well, probably not much. There is nothing to indicate that the interest generated by this year’s presidential contest will carry over to state races. And if we calculate primary turnout as a percentage of registered partisans, we may potentially be going from record highs in February to record lows just four months later.

The Public “Gets It”

The Monmouth University Polling Institute and the Gannett New Jersey newspaper group just released a series of polls assessing New Jersey’s reaction to Governor Corzine’s toll hike plan and budget proposal. One of the questions I am frequently asked as a pollster is if the public can truly understand what’s going on, particularly in terms of the details.

My response is that while most individuals do not absorb all the finer points of public policy, the body politic tends to “get it” even for complex issues. This view has its roots in the concept of “collective wisdom” – the idea that the knowledge of a group qua group is superior to that of the vast majority of its members.

Perhaps the best known demonstration of collective wisdom in action was recorded during the turn of the 20th century. Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and statistician – and relative of Charles Darwin – was attending a county fair and became intrigued by a competition to guess the weight of an ox. He watched as 800 local residents attempted a guess, but no one came up with the animal’s actual weight – 1,198 pounds. Curious about the villagers’ apparently universal lack of estimating ability, Galton recorded each of their guesses and calculated the average estimate for the entire group. It turned out to be 1,197 pounds!

Journalist James Surowiecki recounts this episode in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki posits that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.”

What does that mean for public opinion polls, especially those that ask the public to assess complex spending and financial restructuring issues? Well, the public might not know every line in a budget, but they can develop a pretty good sense of whether they trust the approach that is taken by their political leaders. And collectively, they can be pretty on-target in understanding the scope of an issue.

So, the Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll tried an experiment. We asked New Jersey residents to estimate exactly how much debt the state is in. Among the two-thirds of poll respondents brave enough to hazard a guess, only about 10% were able to come within $5 billion of the actual figure (which is somewhere between $30 and $32 billion, depending on who you ask). However, when all the guesses were averaged together, the collective estimate stood at an amazingly accurate $31.6 billion!

On the national level, the Gallup Poll did this on a somewhat less weighty topic. That pollster asked its respondents to estimate the age of the three remaining presidential candidates. They got Barack Obama’s age right on the money at 46, and underestimated Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s ages by only four years (the average guess was 56 for Clinton and 67 for McCain).

So, when you see poll results that indicate – to take a random example – a majority of the public doubting that proposed cuts were made with the needs of the average taxpayer in mind, think of these words from Surowiecki: “Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.”

It makes you wonder about the veracity of all estimates by the public. For example, when we asked respondents in an October 2007 poll to guess the percentage of state legislators willing to sell out to lobbyists, the average estimate was 60%. That’s 72 out of 120 legislators. Yikes!

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New Jersey Poll Flashback
March 10, 1997: When Governor Christie Whitman wanted to float $2.8 billion in bonds to fund the state pension system, she hoped to move the plan quickly – and quietly – through the legislature. A Star-Ledger/Eagleton Poll found that among those who knew something of the plan, 67% saw it as a gimmick to balance the budget and 73% thought it was simply a way for the governor to push the cost of her tax cuts on to future generations. And, nearly everyone surveyed – 90% – said that this type of borrowing needed to be put on the ballot for a vote. Over time, the state has taken on approximately $27 billion in debt obligations, including some that were declared unconstitutional, where the voters had no say.

Will New Jersey Voters Turn Out?

Based on turnout in the primaries held so far, the answer is Yes! At least relative to our past performance. Primary turnout in New Jersey has not been particularly robust in recent years. Moving the primary up to February should change that, at least for the presidential contest.

The high water mark for primary turnout in the last few election cycles occurred in 2000, when 17% of registered voters came out to choose nominees for the two parties. However, this was driven less by the presidential race – George W. Bush and Al Gore faced only token opposition on the New Jersey ballot – and more by the U.S. Senate primaries. The race to succeed Frank Lautenberg (you may recall, he retired once) included the high-profile showdown between once and future governors Jim Florio and Jon Corzine on the Democratic side and the nail-biter between Bob Franks and Bill Gormley (with Jim Treffinger and Murray Sabrin in the mix) on the Republican side.

Year	Democratic turnout as percent of Registered Democrats	Republican turnout as percent of Registered Republicans	Total turnout as percent of all Registered Voters
2007	21%	18%	8%
2006	19%	21%	8%
2005	24%	37%	12%
2004	22%	20%	9%
2003	21%	20%	9%
2002	22%	28%	11%
2001	23%*	40%*	13%*
2000	42%	37%	17%

       * 2001 includes just ballots cast for governor, not total turnout.

If you look at turnout as just a percentage of registered partisans, the Democrats turned out at a rate of 42% and Republicans at 37% in 2000. That’s not too bad, but in most years only about 1-in-5 partisans have voted in New Jersey primaries. And because fewer than half of the state’s voters have declared a party, that means about 1-in-10 registered voters regularly participate in our primary elections.

While unaffiliated voters can technically vote in either primary, the truth is that very few of them actually do. New Jersey doesn’t officially track the number of unaffiliated voters who show up on primary day. Preliminary research by the Monmouth University Polling Institute indicates that, in many counties, unaffiliateds who vote in primaries number in the tens rather than thousands. (We’re working on getting a more robust count of that phenomenon this year.)

That’s the real reason 58% of New Jersey’s voters are “independent”. Voters don’t need to make their party commitment official until they decide to vote in a primary. In truth, a good portion of those voters – as much as one-third by our estimates – are partisans at heart. Specifically, they tend to vote a straight party-line in general elections, while retaining their non-partisan registration.

So, how many voters will turn out on February 5th? Well, New Jersey’s voter rolls for this primary stand at 1,170,644 Democrats and 874,752 Republicans, with 2,798,817 unaffiliated voters who can show up and vote in either primary.

In other states this year, the Democrats racked up record turnouts in Iowa (nearly double the 2004 turnout), New Hampshire (up 30%), and South Carolina (up 80%). Even Florida, which was supposed to be a delegate-free “beauty contest”, saw 1.7 million Democratic votes cast; 30% better than their previous high in 1976. And the exit polls showed that most new voters were coming out for Barack Obama.

Republican turnout has also been strong in spots, if not quite as universally enthusiastic as the Democrats. New Hampshire turnout basically matched the 2000 high (when McCain beat Bush), but was about 22% lower in South Carolina and 32% lower in Michigan. However, last week’s Florida turnout of 1.9 million Republican voters doubled that state’s prior high from 1988. Turning to New Jersey, we would expect Republican turnout to be somewhat less robust than the Democratic side, especially with New York neighbor Rudy Giuliani out of the race.

Will turnout reach prior state highs? In 1984, 676,561 New Jerseyans cast ballots in the Democratic contest between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart – the last time New Jersey found itself voting in a contested nominating campaign. To find similar turnout for Garden State Republicans you have to go back to 1952, when the G.O.P. race turned out 643,066 voters to help Dwight Eisenhower to his eventual nomination. (Read more on turnout at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball).

There’s one point about moving up New Jersey’s primary that has largely escaped notice. High voter turnout on February 5 will provide a bonus for local candidates and party organizations come November. Since voting in a primary automatically registers voters with a party, political operatives will be able to identify a greater proportion of their base from voter rolls.

After the presidential hoopla of Super Tuesday passes we will still have our June primaries for Senate, Congress and local offices (although the G.O.P. has drawn out the presidential process by putting their delegates on that ballot as well). And, for those important, but lower-profile primary races, we can probably expect New Jersey’s lackluster voter turnout to return to form.

Polls on Tolls

I wasn't sure whether to call this entry "Taking a Poll on Tolls" or "Taking a Toll on Polls".

A Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Poll on the toll road plan proposed by Governor Corzine was released today.

Our findings paint a slightly different picture from the poll released by the Bergen Record on Monday (see story and poll results). This follows presidential primary polls where our polls differed as well. Herb Jackson did a pretty good job summing up the differences in methodology on his election blog, so I’ll just focus on the toll road polls here.

The Record poll, which is conducted by Research 2000 in Maryland, found 42% in favor of the plan, 52% opposed, and 6% with no opinion. The Monmouth/Gannett poll found only 15% in favor, 56% opposed, and 29% with no opinion. So, what’s up with that?

One of the key differences in assessing public reaction to the toll road plan is the way the questions were worded in the two polls. The Record’s poll described the plan as “reining in New Jersey’s public debt load by imposing a series of 50 percent toll hikes…Proceeds of bonds backed by the future revenue increases would be used to retire debt and fund new road improvements.” Our poll described it as a “plan to raise tolls about 50 percent every four years over the next 14 years in order to reduce state debt and fund transportation projects.”

The Record wording started off by emphasizing “reining in debt” while ours started with the cost issue. We also spelled out a time frame for the toll hikes. The Record’s poll asked respondents whether they “strongly favor, favor, oppose, or strongly oppose.” Our poll asked “do you favor or oppose this plan, or do you have no opinion?”

This may all seem a bit esoteric for the casual poll watcher, but in the short time frame after the toll plan was released (although it has been spoken about for months), question wording and response option choices can matter. Each poll started interviewing the day after Corzine’s State of the State address, but the Record completed interviewing in two days, while the Monmouth/Gannett poll interviewed for five days.

Differences in question wording, as in this case, are valid choices made by pollsters as ways to tap what the public is really thinking and it is incumbent upon us not to “create” opinion by phrasing questions that are far removed from the experiences and discussions of the typical resident.

And we have to be fair in the way we word the questions. Most “favor or oppose” questions are just that. The pollster will only record a “no opinion” response if the respondent insists. On this issues, I heard from a number of plan supporters that they believed many members of the public wouldn’t care about this plan since they don’t drive the toll roads. So, it made sense to explicitly include the “no opinion” option in the question we used.

But that alone doesn’t explain the differences between the two polls’ results. There are some interesting demographic differences in the poll breakdowns. In the Record poll, Democrats support the plan by a 62%-32% margin while Republicans reject it by 81%-17%. Independents reject it by a slimmer 55%-39% margin. In our poll, residents of all partisan stripes rejected the plan, including Democrats (48%-19%), Republicans (68%-9%) and independents (57%-16%).

There appears to be some serious difference in the Democrats interviewed by the Record and those interviewed by us. The Record poll’s sample was comprised of 600 New Jerseyans who reported they generally vote in state elections and are likely to vote this November. Our poll was composed of 804 New Jersey adult residents. [Side note: As a matter of standard procedure, the Monmouth/Gannett poll prefers full population samples when polling about issues that affect all residents, whether they vote or not.]

Does this mean that Governor Corzine does better among people who will go out to vote when (and if) he runs for re-election? Well, not necessarily. When we drilled down our sample to the most likely group of voters, we found that opinion of the plan stood at 16% favor, 58% oppose, and 26% no opinion – nearly identical to our results for the general population.

Aside from the type of sample used by each poll (likely voter vs. adult population), there are some key differences in how the surveys are weighted. We use weighting techniques make sure our surveys are representative of the population on region of state, gender, age, education and race.

One thing we don’t use in our weighting is party identification. Party ID is an attitude that is subject to change, unlike hard demographic data (unless of course you’re planning on a sex change operation). Most media pollsters ask something along the lines of: “In politics today, do you consider yourself a Democrat, Republican or independent?”.

A major difference between the two polls is our party breakdowns. Our full population sample in this poll identified itself as 37% Dem, 22% Rep – we are pretty a blue state – and 41% independent. The Bergen Record poll’s party-self identification is 28% Dem, 14% Rep, and 58% independent.

While New Jersey’s electorate is pretty fickle, it’s not that independent. Interestingly, the Bergen Poll party numbers roughly correspond to the party registration figures on the state’s official election rolls. However, as anyone of who has run a campaign in New Jersey knows, a good number of those “unaffiliated” voters consistently vote either Dem or Rep in general elections. You unaffiliateds who are party-line voters know who you are! They are only unaffiliated because they haven’t bothered to vote in one of New Jersey’s typically non-competitive primaries (making turnout projections for this year’s presidential primary that much more interesting).

The problem is if you weight the party preference question (“what do you consider yourself today?”) to the party split in the voter registration books for New Jersey – and I’m not saying this is what Research 2000 did – you’re mixing apples and oranges.

I have some more thoughts (and data) on weighting poll results by party ID. But it’s been a long week, so I’ll leave that for another post.

Drive safely.

What Happened in New Hampshire?

So what went on with those Democratic pre-election primary polls in New Hampshire. My take on it is that we don’t yet know what happened. But the fact that it involved all polls (including both the Clinton and Obama campaigns by all reports) and those same pollsters tabbed the Republican outcome correctly, points to something occurring on the ground Tuesday.

Maybe the polling methodology was universally off-base or perhaps pollsters simply stopped polling too soon to catch an amazing Clinton surge in the final day (both are plausible given the turnout and vagaries of the New Hampshire primary electorate; see this report from the networks’ chief exit pollster.

The post-mortems have begun (for example, here from ABC News and Gallup) and at least one pollster appears to be revising history for his New Hampshire tracking poll. I’m not sure how someone can claim that his data showed Clinton behind by only 2 points on the last day of polling while his rolling average actually increased Obama’s lead from 10 to 13 points. (And I’m pretty sure my New Jersey high school had a decent math program.)

A number of observers have focused on the potential race factor (specifically, white respondents telling a pollster they would vote for a black candidate but casting their ballots otherwise). That may be partially the case, but at present there is little supporting evidence. First of all, in past instances where a candidate’s race has been a factor in polling miscalls, it was in general elections, where white Democrats OVERstated their propensity to support their party’s black nominee. In New Hampshire, we are only considering Democratic or Democratic-leaning independents voting in a primary. Furthermore, Obama’s support was not over-stated in the polls. Clinton’s was understated.

So for race to play a significant factor in the New Hampshire polls’ universal failure, you would have to accept the premise that white, less-educated, likely Democratic primary voters who chose NOT to speak to pollsters were significantly more racist than white, less-educated, likely Democratic primary voters who did answer the pre-election polls. And moreover, that this same group was significantly LESS sexist, because they overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton.

Unlike some pundits who are currently hitting the airwaves and print media with the certainty of their speculations, I’ll withhold judgment on what really happened until we have time to sift through the empirical evidence and get some REAL NUMBERS.

Regardless, the New Hampshire experience is another opportunity to remind poll watchers that pre-election preference polls are just that – polls which measure voters’ preferences prior to an election. The fact that they are generally good predictors of the eventual outcome is in part a testament to the fact that change is usually gradual. Or at least slow enough to be caught the day or two before an election … fickle electorates like New Jersey’s notwithstanding.

Welcome

Welcome to the first installment of the “Real Numbers” blog.

Numbers are knowledge. Numbers are power. They influence everything from media coverage to policy decisions. Unfortunately, not all numbers are created equal. This venture will cast a critical eye on the use of numbers in the public domain – to sort out how “real” numbers are. This blog will generally focus on New Jersey issues, and occasionally venture into the national arena.

The objective is to foster a keener awareness of how numbers are used and misused in the pursuit of political gain or notoriety. As creators of some of those numbers, we at the Monmouth University Polling Institute understand the impact “statistics” can have. Polling numbers will certainly be fodder for many of the entries on this blog, but it will also examine other “real numbers” that gain public currency (e.g. funding formulas, health care stats, voting turnout, etc.).

In some cases, the blog will turn its attention to numbers built on faulty methodology. But in many more cases, readers can expect a discussion of how justifiable variations in methodology can be used to reach different conclusions.

For example, what does the New Jersey public consider to be a “significant” property tax cut? In a poll we conducted in July 2006 most homeowners selected a dollar amount that averaged about 15% of their property tax bill. But we also found that their perception of “significant” depended on how the question was asked. If we started off the questioning at $250 and worked up to $2,000, most respondents settled for a lower amount. But if we started the suggested level at $2000, many respondents would not accept the lower boundary as being significant.

In any event, after the final “caps and credit” deal was signed last year providing a property tax credit of 20% for most homeowners, our February 2007 poll found that only 1-in-10 who had heard of the plan believed it would deliver significant, long-term relief. That opinion seemed to have more to do with the plan’s lack of systemic reform than with the dollar amount saved in the first year. Indeed, a Quinnipiac Poll released around the same time found that a large majority of New Jersey voters approved of the intention to lower property taxes by 20%, but disapproved of how the governor and legislature had handled the issue.

In the end, the main objective of this blog is to increase accountability for the dissemination of numbers in the public domain, including any numbers that appear on this site. So when you see a post that is off base, let me know by posting a comment.

In the meantime, for those of you, especially journalists, who would like to learn a little more about interpreting polls for the non-pollster, spend a little time with this free News University online training, developed by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.