This new poll—discussed here by Peter Baker and Dahlia Sussmann—is already getting attention for what the article doesn’t say: this survey is a “panel-back.” That is, respondents who were previously interviewed in an April 13-17 poll have been interviewed again. You will learn this if you choose to click through to the toplines of the poll (same deal at CBS). You will learn more if you read what Steven Shepard says at National Journal, or what Mark Blumenthal said about panel-backs a while back.
The funny thing here is that, as far as I can tell, the usual complaint about panel-backs doesn’t even apply. The usual complaint is that the respondents who agree to be reinterviewed are different from those who don’t. I don’t see a ton of evidence for that. Compared to the April sample, the May sample is a bit more likely to disapprove of Obama’s job performance but doesn’t show a similar shift on other related items (like party identification). It’s harder to assess another critique of panels—that answers in the earlier poll affected answers in the later poll—but in general I wouldn’t expect this sort of “panel conditioning” to be a big factor.
Instead, what struck me about this poll was what more CBS and the Times could have done with it—that is, how much better the analysis could have been. I am building here off my post on questions to ask regarding the electoral impact of Obama’s same-sex marriage endorsement. I’ll go through key passages from the NY Times article.
Most Americans suspect that President Obama was motivated by politics, not policy, when he declared his support for same-sex marriage, according to a new poll released on Monday, suggesting that the unplanned way it was announced shaped public attitudes. Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed by The New York Times and CBS News since the announcement said they thought that Mr. Obama had made it “mostly for political reasons,” while 24 percent said it was “mostly because he thinks it is right.” Independents were more likely to attribute it to politics, with nearly half of Democrats agreeing. The results reinforce the concerns of White House aides and Democratic strategists who worried that the sequence of events leading up to the announcement last week made it look calculated rather than principled.
