Trump’s executive order, polls and manipulation

Ipsos recently did a poll for Reuters about Trump’s executive order, which I already discussed at length before, according to which, to the amazement of the sophisticates, a plurality of Americans agree with it. According to that poll, 48% of Americans agree with Trump’s decision, while only 41% of them disagree. This was probably not what the people at Reuters expected, so they proceeded to do their best to spin that poll as bad news for Trump, which it evidently isn’t. Indeed, instead of making their headline about the fact that a plurality of people agree with the order, which is clearly the most important result of that poll and no doubt the one they would have run with if the results had been reversed, they used “Only one third of Americans think Trump’s travel ban will make them more safe”. Which is true, at least according to this poll, but as the article points out, the number of Americans who believe it will make them less safe is even smaller…

The Guardian also published a piece on this, which falsely claims that Trump’s order “does not ban all refugees – only Muslim refugees”. This, as anyone who has actually read the order can tell, is a filthy lie. The order suspends the admission of every refugee for 120 days and indefinitely for those who come from Syria. The religion of the refugees or the country they come from does not make any difference. What the order does say is that, upon the resumption of the US Refugee Admission Program, priority will be given to those who are persecuted because of their religion and constitute a religious minority in their country: « Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, to prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality. »

In order to justify the false claim that Trump’s order only bans muslim refugees, the author of the article writes this badly confused summary: « The order states that refugees will be admitted if “the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality” – all seven countries mentioned in the order have a Muslim-majority population. » This confuses the travel ban, which only concerns people from the seven muslim-majority countries mentioned in the order (regardless of their religion), with the suspension of the USRAP, which concerns refugees from any countries whatsoever regardless of their religion. It also doesn’t show that muslim refugees will not be admitted after the admission of refugees resumes, nor that only christians and no muslims will be prioritized. Indeed, depending on how you individuate religions, the order might give priority to refugees from Syria who are alawites, since that branch of islam is a minority over there. Regardless of how religions are individuated, it gives priority to the Rohingyas from Myanmar, who are muslims but a minority in their country.

There are other polls which show a different result, but as the Huffington Post points out, the polls that were conducted online tend to show more support for the order than those using live interviews. It’s as if people were loath to tell to a real person they agree with that order, after it has been presented in the media as the worst thing since Hitler exterminated the Jews in Europe during WW2… While the polls don’t paint a clear picture of whether most Americans agree with Trump’s executive order, it seems at least clear that, whether or not a majority of them do,  the country is pretty much evenly divided. Moreover, if you look at the details of the polls, it’s divided very neatly along partisan lines.

Still, if the Democrats thought that this was going to burn Trump, they were probably wrong. In fact, as I argued before, I think they are making a strategic mistake. Welcoming refugees is reliably unpopular everywhere in the West and so is mass immigration. (This is true even in the US, although you may not know that, because most polls on immigration that make the headlines are designed to give a different impression. I will probably write a post about this when I have time.) So it’s a pretty safe bet that, in the long-run, Trump will benefit from adopting a restrictionist immigration policy and the Democrats will regret their posturing on that issue, as people start identifying them with the pro-immigration party.

For the moment, liberals take comfort in another poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, according to which 40% of registered voters are in favor of Trump’s impeachment. PPP is well known for its suspicious methods and its liberal bias, but don’t expect journalists to tell you about this. On the other hand,  whenever they report the results of a survey conducted by Rasmussen, most of them systematically remind their readers that Rasmussen has a conservative bias.  Which they should, since it’s true (although it would be even better if they examined the methodology and pointed out what’s wrong about it), but you’d think that they would do the same thing with pollsters that are biased in favor of the Democratic party, especially when the result they report is as sensational as the one I’m talking about.

Now, if you look at the details of the poll in question, the first thing you should notice is that the sample leans heavily Democratic. Indeed, 41% of respondents say they’re Democrats, 30% that they are Republican and 29% that they are Independents. Since PPP provides a crosstab of the results on the question about Trump’s executive order along partisan affiliation and gave a third option to respondents for those who weren’t sure, we can even calculate the partisan breakdown for the people who answered this question specifically, because it means that we have a system of 3 equations with 3 unknowns. When you solve this system, you find that, among people who answer that particular question, 44% identified as Democrats, 33% as Republicans and 23% as Independents. According to Gallup’s latest survey on party affiliation, however, 28% of people identify as Republicans, 25% as Democrats and 44% as Independents. So, if I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t get too excited about that poll…