What Vegans Did To Republicans

Apparently the later national PublicPolicyPolling survey covered a bunch of issues related to food. One of those questions, apparently, was whether people liked or disliked vegans. According to a tweet from PPP:

On our food poll we found that Republicans have a negative opinion of vegans...not sure what vegans ever did to them...

Now, the answer to this could be that Republicans are associating vegans with the kind of people who commit illegal acts, mostly crimes against property, with an animal-rights-y agenda. It's fair enough to dislike the latter, I'd say, though insofar as they avoid violence against people I think it's also fair enough not to dislike them. But I don't think this is the impetus behind Republican dislike of vegans.

Rather, I think it's that they, and we vegetarians as well, make them feel bad. Very few Republicans are vegans or vegetarians. Most Republicans like to eat meat. And I think that, for many or most of them, that isn't just because they like how it tastes or whatever. They positively like the fact that they're eating the remains of a formerly living animal. It makes them feel powerful, like they have dominion over the earth. And vegans make Republicans feel bad about this. Sometimes this is through explicit criticism in conversation, or whatever, but it doesn't even need to be. Simply by adhering to a moral code that considers something these people do on a regular basis to be wrong, vegans and vegetarians by our very being imply that these meat-eating Republicans are doing something wrong. We're the worst possible manifestation of the liberal tendency to want to control everything about a person's life: we want to control what you can eat. And that's not even wrong, entirely, though I do know some vegans who'll tell you that what you eat is a personal choice (something I don't believe, on this particular issue). And we invade the natural social-conservative terrain of moralizing (though of course, if we get into the philosophical weeds, I could say that the vegan/vegetarian moralizing is consequentialist, while the typical Republican variety is deontological, so they're very different things). Basically, simply by being vegans or vegetarians we offend the Republican idea that the right kind of people, at least, can stomp around the world doing whatever they want, and making other people feel bad for doing the wrong things. So they dislike us: it's not surprising.

You Can't Talk About IVR Polling Without Talking About Rasmussen

It's often a major error to analyze some shift in American politics, especially in the demographics thereof, without asking first whether it's really a nationwide phenomenon you're observing or just a really strong Southern phenomenon. For instance, I recently saw some numbers showing that essentially all of Obama's national deficit with white working-class voters comes from the South. Surprise! Southern whites, including the not-terribly-rich ones, don't like Barack Obama. Who'd've thought?

I think this study suggesting that IVR polls, commonly known as "robo-polls" where there's no live human interviewer, just prerecorded questions that one answers by pressing buttons, are "copying" live-interviewer polls to get better accuracy struggles from somewhat of a similar situation. Their evidence is that IVR polls have really lousy accuracy when they're conducted in a race that no standard-methodology pollster has yet touched, but once a race has seen a standard pollster check it out, IVR polling is just as accurate as live-interviewer thereafter. The people at PublicPolicyPolling, an intensely prolific and typically really accurate IVR polling firm, are naturally not thrilled with this. But I think the real problem with the survey is that, just as one errs by treating all of America, South and otherwise, as being one integral nation, one errs by treating all IVR pollsters alike.

Specifically, of course, I'm talking about Rasmussen Reports. Because here's the thing: we liberal polling junkies have been noticing for several years now that there's a distinctive pattern to Rasmussen's polling. Very early in a cycle, their polls look ridiculous. Specifically, they're ridiculously skewed toward the Republican candidates. Later in the cycle, if they continue to poll at all, their polls become much more sensible, and end up being quite accurate. What it looks like, given that it's pretty well-known that Rasmussen is a deeply partisan firm with a pretty substantial history of hackishness, is that early in cycles Rasmussen is engaged in polling-as-messaging, trying to create a buzz around Republican candidates that, perhaps, no one's ever given much heed to. That happened with Scott Brown, for instance. Then, since polling firms are basically only judged on the last batch of polls they release, later in the cycle Rasmussen starts using more sensible turnout models, etc., perhaps "copying" from the consensus of the polling to get good results and maintain their reputation, such as it is.

The result is that the largest chunk of robo-polling is conducted by a firm that is deliberately being inaccurate early in the cycle, when few of the traditional pollsters are yet at work, and deliberately making itself more accurate at crunch time, when most contests have already received a whole bunch o' polling. That would easily be enough to produce the kind of data that study found, I'm guessing, so I'd like to see the study run again excluding Rasmussen. I'd be pretty surprised if the result didn't change.