Today MoveOn announced the results of its poll subsequent to the Town Hall on Iraq. From the perspective of an organizer, there's a very interesting discrepancy between the results from all MoveOn voters, including those who only read about the event or viewed some of the YouTube videos and then voted and the results from only the participants in the house meetings.
Here's the all voter breakdown:
Update for Gretchen in comments and others who can't read the small type:
All MoveOn votes cast:
Obama-28, Edwards-25, Kucinich-17, Richardson-12, Clinton-11, Biden-6, Dodd-1
Here are the votes from the smaller segment that actually experienced the poll as an event among their neighbors:
Percentages:
Housemeeting attendees:
Edwards-24, Richardson-21, Obama-19, Kucinich-15, Biden-10, Clinton-7, Dodd-4
Richardson soared among this sub-segment. Edwards and Obama were strong in both, but traded the top spot. Kucinich, Clinton, Biden and Dodd all trailed by somewhat similar margins in each.
Clearly that very careful and concerned subset of people who were willing to go to a public meeting to hear the candidates found something attractive in Richardson when exposed to him in that collective setting. Folks who merely engaged with this poll online probably didn't give Richardson a viewing.
Chris Bowers at MyDD provides data on which YouTube videos were viewed:
Obama: 11,060
Edwards: 10,142
Clinton: 5,142
Richardson: 3,914
Kucinich: 2,839
Biden: 2,195
Dodd: 1,433
Looks like only the top two really got a chance with folks whose exposure was entirely online (making the assumption that Clinton's internet-based support is pretty small and inelastic.)
For organizers, this ought re-teach the lesson that turning people out to events is worth the enormous energy it takes, because the experience does change them.
For the Richardson campaign, it certainly means they've got to somehow get their guy in front of more people!
This is really cool.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I've posted this here before, but I'd really like your readers to see it:
Re: the Iraq war in general
(also see this post)
Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn't it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein's regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.
So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.
Granted, it’s certainly possible the CIA could have changed their minds about the war, as a lot of people have, and could now be trying to move the nation closer to withdrawal.
Hard to tell what these charts show--the color key is so tiny. How about a chart with the percentages?
ReplyDelete