Talk Politics Midweek Roundtable: The Most Important Legislative Issue Remaining

This week’s “Talk Politics” roundtable is online now. You can watch the video below.

This week, Talk Business & Politics Editor-in-Chief Roby Brock, KATV”s lead capitol reporter Janelle Lilley, Impact Management Group”s Clint Reed, and Hendrix College political scientist Dr. Jay Barth were our roundtable guests.

Reed and Barth discussed the latest survey results from our combined polling efforts, including the differences between Internet results and landline results.

Both men agreed that the Internet results, while a small portion of the overall sample, tended to skew more progressive, more African-American, and younger in age. Lilley noted that she had little contact with anyone who still has a landline.

More of Reed”s and Barth”s analysis is posted below the video link in this report.

What are the most important issues still remaining in the current legislative session? Should state institutions be prohibited from funding lobbyists with public money? And, should Supreme Court justices be selected rather than elected?

Watch the video for more opinion.

“Talk Politics” can be viewed online on Wednesday afternoons on KATV.com and TalkBusiness.net. And, be sure to tune in to Talk Business & Politics Sundays at 9 a.m.

ANALYSIS OF POLLING METHODS COMPARISON: INTERNET VS. PHONE LINES

Dr. Jay Barth, professor of political science at Hendrix College, offered this analysis.

In addition to our experimentation with the power of question wording over public opinion, this survey also marked our first step into the world of online polling. Just at 10 percent of our survey respondents carried out the survey online while the remainder answered questions through a telephone survey. The online respondents skewed younger, more African-American, and more heavily male. These are all groups that we have had difficulty capturing in phone surveys (including those that incorporated cell phones) in the past.

On many questions, the online and telephone respondents varied little in their responses. On several questions, however, we did see variation based on polling methodology suggesting that, if we are to fully capture the range of public opinion in Arkansas, we do need to consider polls that are delivered in a variety of ways.

First, major variations between telephone and online survey respondents was shown on Arkansas-based public approval questions. On most questions, online respondents were about 10 percentage points less supportive than online slots Republican officeholders than were phone respondents. However, quite interestingly, on the question gauging approval of President Obama, almost no variation was shown between phone and online respondents. This suggests that (mostly negative) attitudes toward the President have soaked quite deeply into the Arkansas electorate.

On the questions related to the private option, online respondents were considerably more supportive than the phone respondents. For the version of the question on the private option that we’ve consistently asked since debate over it began, a plurality of phone respondents support it, but a very healthy majority (63%) of online respondents support the extension. Similar differences are shown on other iterations of private option questions.

The short story: Those willing to communicate with pollsters via the internet are different demographically and attitudinally than their peers who respond to phone surveys. Our challenge moving forward is to figure out what mix makes the most sense as we attempt to accurately and consistently gauge the ups and downs of the Arkansas electorate.

Clint Reed with Impact Management Group provided this analysis.

The universe of online responses is relatively small to draw any statistical significance given the large margin of error; however, the intuitive demographic breaks exist in this survey among online versus phone responses.

Among all online respondents, 55% came from those 18-49 year olds compared to only 7% among 65 year old respondents. Conversely, two -thirds (67%) of all phone responses were from 50-65 year old respondents; only one-third (33%) of phone responses come from 18-49 year olds.

In terms of policy and within the private option messaging questions, all online respondents supported the program at a 50% margin or higher. Drilling down, are on-line respondents more “moderate” even across the political stripes? This might indicate as much.

There is also a widely held belief that the Democratic Party has a “leg up” on Republicans in the “digital space.” Among all online respondents in this survey, 90% are self-identified Republicans. This subsample is extremely small and could be an outlier, but it is worth exploring further.

In the last campaign cycle, statewide Republicans dominated Democrats among social media metrics. For example, Tom Cotton had over 10,000 followers on Twitter compared to Mark Pryor’s 2,000. Asa Hutchinson had almost 6,000 followers compared to Mike Ross’ 3,500. Facebook “likes” were also dominated by Republican candidates. Is this indicative of an emerging trend that Republicans control the social media platforms? It is definitely worth additional research.