If You Don’t Vote, Does It Matter What You Think?

The “news” from the latest St. Norbert’s poll is that Gov. Doyle is allegedly at the nadir of his popularity, because less than 50 percent are satisfied or very satisfied with his leadership.

Time is ticking and soon the chorus of Wisconsin conservatives will be claiming this “drop in popularity” is due to the Governor needing to raise taxes on those at the absolute top of the economic ladder (no one earning less than $300,000).

This is garbage.For instance, looking at the methodology, the survey is a phone survey from “400 randomly selected people” over a nine-day period.

Randomly selected is much different from likely voters. And since voters are the only ones who make changes to those in political office, it’s really irrelevant, if you think about it.

In addition, a couple other things to consider when hearing about polls in which “likely voters” are not the respondents:

* By not participating in elections, non-likely voters are generally less engaged in understanding the issues
* By not participating in elections, non-likely voters will do nothing that effects the outcome of elections so the findings of surveys like this are generally ignored by elected officials as nothing other than inaccurate p.r. material

Something to think about when the predictable missive comes out from Preibus over at the WisGOP about how the Governor’s willingness to raise taxes on those earning more than $300,000 a year or those corporations who dodge Wisconsin taxes by doing their business here but claiming a post office box in Las Vegas is their actually HQ is somehow making him less popular.