Tag Archives: polling

Labor Day 2015: America is actually pro-union, finds Gallup

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58% of Americans approve of Labor unions. 61% would like to see them have at least as much, if not more, influence in the future. The U.S. media consistently denigrates organized labor and suggests everyone hates them and all problems are their fault. That should stop.

(Source: Gallup, August 2015 via Polling Report)

Recently on this topic from AFD:

– The origin story of minimum wage laws, part 1
– The origin story of minimum wage laws, part 2
– Fair wages are just another operational cost to meet
– Key win for workers in the subcontract/franchise economy

NYC: Overwhelming opposition to the NYPD mutiny

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Back in November 2013, 72% of New Yorkers, of those who voted, voted for Bill de Blasio and his police reform platform. The media said “oh well it was just low turnout. Can’t be representative.”

Weird. Because:

About 69 percent of New York City voters disapprove of police officers turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio during the funerals for two police officers who were shot and killed in December, a Quinnipiac University poll of nearly 1,200 New Yorkers found.

 
So, 69% disapprove of the NYPD physically turning their backs on de Blasio for promoting police reform? Wow, it’s almost like it’s (statistically speaking) the same share as those who voted for the candidate with a police reform agenda. 

Further disapproval was registered against the mutinous, unilateral dereliction of duty known as the “slowdown.”

About 57 percent of New Yorker voters told Quinnipiac that police officers should be disciplined if they deliberately make fewer arrests or write fewer tickets.

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City (Credit: Kevin Case via Wikimedia)

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City (Credit: Kevin Case via Wikimedia)

Selected highlights (lowlights?) from the new Pew religion poll

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The new huge Pew Form report on politics and religion in America is out now. It’s one of the most discouraging I can remember in the past 5 years. The proportion of people who think there should be more religion in politics is up, the proportion who support same-sex marriage has leveled or dropped, the proportion who think being gay is a sin is up, and the Christian right is still agitating for being allowed more direct political involvement by their churches. The more things don’t go their way, the more they dig in.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a lot more in the report. The only good sign I’ve picked out of the report so far is that most Democratic voters polled said the party was representing their social views well. While it wasn’t necessarily overwhelmingly true on specific issues, it seems to be more true than before.

I suspect that’s a result of a combination of some non-aligned (i.e. socially conservative) Democratic voters dropping out of the party finally and the expulsion or reduced visibility of a number of anti-gay and anti-abortion Democratic candidates and elected officials in recent years — an important trend that I looked at in a recent post. Meanwhile, the more socially liberal or socially centrist Democrats in office have begun speaking more loudly and confidently in favor of gay rights and reproductive freedom. This whole process is ongoing, but it’s helping socially liberal base Democrats not feel alienated by loud and offensive conservative Democratic officeholders and underrepresented by those who agree with them.

Many White Americans still clueless on Ferguson, finds Pew poll

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Not surprising, but still very disturbing results from a Pew poll on the Ferguson situation.

47% of White Americans think “race is getting too much attention” in a story of nearly exclusively White police forces openly oppressing and attacking a two-thirds Black community after shooting down an unarmed Black kid without any known probable cause at the time.

Meanwhile, only one third of White Americans believe the “police response has gone too far.” You know, the response where police are firing dangerous nerve gas and bullet-alternatives (which have killed people in other cases) into crowds with children in them.

But in defense of the clueless masses, the mainstream news media reports keep uncritically repeating the fanciful law enforcement claims that they were under siege by “Molotov cocktails” no one has seen and “coordinated” attacks on their command center, which doesn’t seem grounded in reality. So, even if some people still wouldn’t have a problem with the police response when given the real facts of the situation, a larger proportion don’t have access to those facts in the first place to make an accurate assessment.