Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows
Twenty-nine percent of non-voters who supported Biden in 2020 said U.S. support for the genocide was the top reason they sat the 2024 election, according to a survey by YouGov.
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It's doubtable this poll has uncovered something that countless other post-election polls have missed.
It's more likely that the pollster is biased. This is the first sentence of About section of the pollster's website: "Palestinians, like all people, are entitled to live in freedom and with their human rights respected. Yet, for too long, the US government has funded and enabled Israel’s denial of Palestinian human rights."
But other polls have found similar results?
I dug into the survey and it appears they intentionally skewed the results by the word choice and order of the questions.
For example: "5. Do you [favor or oppose] the Biden administration approving taxpayer-funded weapons and other military support to Israel, even if the U.S. government has no control over whether the Israeli military uses those weapons on innocent civilians in Gaza, or are you undecided?"
The wording in that question will predispose a respondent to view the Biden administration negatively, even if that wasn't the main reason that a respondent chose not to vote.
Worse, they asked that question before they asked about sitting out the election, predisposing the respondent to view that topic as more significant in their decision to sit out the election.
If the purpose of a poll was to figure out the reason for not voting, this is not a scientific way to do it. It predictably would skew results as it appears to have done.
Thanks for digging into it - yeah, that's definitely not a neutral way to phrase things.
Made me look too! Holy shit those are loaded questions.
Imagine thinking that Palestinians being human beings is indicative of a bias. Yikes....
Yes, it does smell of bias when we're talking about statistics and polling. Why would you even mention all that in such a story? It should be a dry, here's the facts kinda story.
"We believe $X and here's the polling to prove it."
The problem with that is that the actual polling questions did not indicate any such bias nor did they try to ask leading questions in the way that you're implying.
News coverage always has a political viewpoint to express (including the """centrist""" slop that often gets peddaled as "unbiased"), and so yeah, you'll find such ""bias"" as maybe we shouldn't be engaging in a horrific genocide from progressive news outlets. But the polling questions were pretty direct and clear in a non-leading way.
Do you [favor or oppose] the Biden administration approving taxpayer-funded weapons and other military support to Israel, even if the U.S. government has no control over whether the Israeli military uses those weapons on innocent civilians in Gaza, or are you undecided?
How much do you [agree or disagree] with the following statement: The $18 billion in weapons the U.S. provided to Israel over the last year, funded by taxpayer dollars, would be better spent lowering costs and supporting Americans dealing with inflation and struggling to afford basics like housing and healthcare.
These questions inform the participant of basic facts about the DNC's strategy on Israel. So this survey provides a great look at what non-voters think of Harris when they're informed about the issues. But it doesn't actually tell us why they didn't vote, because it doesn't give us any information on how non-voters think when they're uninformed. And many non-voters were uninformed. This would be an excellent survey in a perfect world where people understand the consequences of their decisions, and it's a terrible survey in a world where people have no clue what their leaders are doing with their tax dollars.
The other polls which had Kamala leading Trump?