Unity '08 discovers its followers share its opinions

If you polled the attendees at the Democratic National Convention, you'd expect to find strong supporters of the Democratic Party and people who don't like George Bush right? Similarly, if you polled attendees at the Republican Convention, you wouldn't be surprised to find that your poll showed support for lower taxes and a distrust of the Democratic Congress. Today, Unity '08 has released the results of its on-line survey which we told you about here. Surprisingly, it found that people who were attracted to Unity '08's message of discontent with today's political climate were, in fact, discontented with today's political climate.

Here's the crux of what Unity '08 is all about, in its own words:

Unity08 believes that neither of today’s major parties reflects the aspirations, fears or will of the majority of Americans. Both have polarized and alienated the people. Both are unduly influenced by single-issue groups. Both are excessively dominated by money.
***
We believe that, while the leaders of both major parties are well intentioned people, they are trapped in a flawed system — and that the two major parties are today simply neither relevant to the issues and challenges of the 21st Century nor effective in addressing them.

As a result, most Americans have not been enthusiastic about the choices for President in recent elections, the key issues they ran on, or the manner in which the campaigns were conducted.

Last month, Unity '08 promoted a survey on its website and via e-mail to those who had expressed interest in the Unity '08 concept, to gauge opinion on its goals. Unsurprisingly, they found that the people interested in Unity '08:

• Had a low opinion of Congress and "the federal government in Washington"
• Disagreed strongly with the statement "Government is run for the benefit of all"
• Believed that "parties are so polarized, nothing gets done
• Approved strongly of "Unity 08 idea of third Presidential choice
• None of the current candidates for President live up to the survey takers' expectations of a strong candidate

Hmmm.... I wonder how they managed to figure out the "right" answers to those questions. While Unity '08 seems to be billing these results as evidence of their political support, they in fact merely confirm a selectional bias, that people interested in Unity '08 to begin with generally share its distaste for the current political climate. This was not a random sample of the American population.

As Marc at the Van Der Galiën Gazette notes, only about 20,000 people took part in the survey, and the sample turned out to be terribly unrepresentative of the population of this country. As Tully noted in comments at The Gazette:

I thought the respondent demographics were the most interesting part. The median Unity ‘08 respondent was a middle-aged male with a college degree, in a middle-level professional job.

IOW, roughly the same disaffected populist/libertarian demographic that drove the Perot campaign in ‘92.

Of the survey respondents, 61% had at least a college degree. The average age was 51, and 60% were age 50 or more. A full 73% were male, only 27% female. Racial, ethnic, and religious details were not provided.

Another big Unity '08 point is the separation of issues between those which are "crucial" to our future and those which are merely "important." Here again, Unity managed to find survey takers who largely agreed with their original position. From their original, pre-survey page on their beliefs:

Unity08 divides issues facing the country into two categories: Crucial Issues — on which America’s future safety and welfare depend; and Important Issues — which, while vital to some, will not, in our judgment, determine the fate or future of the United States.

In our opinion, Crucial Issues include: Global terrorism, our national debt, our dependence on foreign oil, the emergence of India and China as strategic competitors and/or allies, nuclear proliferation, global climate change, the corruption of Washington’s lobbying system, the education of our young, the health care of all, and the disappearance of the American Dream for so many of our people.

By contrast, we consider gun control, abortion and gay marriage important issues, worthy of debate and discussion in a free society, but not issues that should dominate or even crowd our national agenda.

The survey asked participants to rank issues on a scale, where 6 equals absolutely crucial and 1 equals merely important. While the survey takers clearly got their signal across, this area may sound the one discordant, unified note of the survey. While in the ranked order, Unity '08's own list of "crucial" issues generally prevailed as the most important, the gap between the most and least important was not as high as their rhetoric suggests. I've reproduced their graphic below, since this is such a key part of Unity.

Even among this highly self-selected group of survey participants, people who adore Unity '08 as a general concept, the participants refused to accept the basic Unity premise that we're being distracted by irrelevant issues. Every issue was, on average, marked at least "extremely important," except for gay marriage, which was ranked about 3/4s of the way up to extremely important from "very important." "Gun ownership" was given the same importance as "growth of the economy" and "poverty in America." "Abortion rights" were ranked as more important than crime. "Family values" ranked higher than "health care." "Illegal immigration" ranked above "energy supplies."

This goes to a fundamental criticism I've had of Unity '08 since it was first announced.

[W]e all have deep, strongly-held disagreements about some fundamental issues. Take a "crucial" issue for Unity '08, nuclear proliferation. Will the Unity platform be in favor of military force to prevent it? If so, under what circumstances? Will it have a Carter-esque aversion to force despite major provocation, or a Reagan-esque free Grenada appreciation of force?

Unity '08 wants to gloss over our disagreements, assuming that they don't really exist on any of the issues, crucial or otherwise. That's a recipe for disaster. As I said when we first discussed this issue at Centerfield last year:

We are not divided by our disagreements, but by our refusal to negotiate resolutions to those disagreements.

The point is, the differences of opinion are real. Even among those who agree that we should focus more time talking about terrorism than about gay marriage, the disagreements over how to combat terrorism are real, serious, and substantial. It is entirely appropriate to have several voice strongly advocating in public for their preferred solution to the problem. But Unity '08 wants to ignore those differences and settle on some general, vague, broad pronouncements which only the most obtuse could object to substantively, and then select and support a candidate who may or may not share those same positions.

In my view, the biggest problem we have facing us politically today are the number of people who run around shrilly pronouncing the sky to be falling because politicians are behaving like politicians. We certainly have room for improvement, but the end of the Republic is not nigh. By promoting candidates on a platform of "the sky is falling," Unity '08 is contributing to the problem, not the solution.