National Journal's Sara Sorcher reports on the instant responses to last night's address:
According to CBS News and Knowledge Networks' "instant poll," which surveyed a nationally representative sample of 500 viewers in the minutes after the president’s address, 91 percent said they approved of Obama’s message and proposals, with only 9 percent saying they disapproved. This is a significant increase from last year, when the same poll found 83 percent of viewers approved of Obama’s State of the Union.Another instant poll by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. found that 52 percent of speech watchers reported a very positive reaction, with 32 percent saying they had a somewhat positive response. Only 15 percent said they disapproved of his speech. The sample included 475 people.
Of course, none of these things matter. As I noted in my State of the Union response piece (which you should read), "instant results are skewed by audience demographics (generally, the president's supporters are those who tune in) and instant impressions are usually fleeting." Moreover, watching a speech isn't the same as paying attention to a speech; it's very likely that viewers took the wrong -- or a skewed -- message from the speech. To wit: here is NPR's word cloud of audience reactions:
If Obama's lame salmon joke was the one thing that most viewers took away from the State of the Union, then I'm going to go ahead and double down on my view that instant reactions are basically useless.
-- Jamelle Bouie
