Polling on Right To Work

David Yepsen’s column today makes the argument that Democrats in the state legislature should avoid changing anything to do with Iowa’s right to work law or risk losing control in 2008.  He asserts that “Polls show overwhelming support for such worker freedom.”

A few weeks ago, I started getting strange calls on my Blackberry from a number I didn’t recognize.  I didn’t answer the first few times the number popped up.  Finally, after it was clear that this person wanted to talk to me and would not leave a message, I answered the next call I got, and it turned out to be someone in a call center in Missouri (I think it was Missouri) taking a poll.  It was clear from the first question (something to do with protections for “the right to life,” without saying what the “right to life” was) that the poll of Iowa voters was being conducted by some conservative operation.

Question three, word for word, was “Do you support Iowa’s Right To Work Law?”

All of the survey questions were slanted to create a pattern of “Yes” answers (that is, when they wanted someone to say they did not support a particular law, they would ask “Do you disagree with X?” instead of “Do you agree with X?”), and the callers seemed to have been instructed to sound happier when someone answered “Yes” rather than “No.”  In a survey like that, of course the vast majority of Iowa voters are going to say “Yes.”

But if you asked them, instead, “Do you think it is important that Iowa workers are able to engage in collective bargaining with their employers?” it seems plausible that an equal number would have said “Yes.”  I’m not sure what polls Yepsen has seen on the issue, but I thought at least mentioning how slanted and disingenuous the survey I got was might help get us beyond the discussion of poll numbers.

1 comment January 30th, 2007