Divide

Back when FiveThirtyEight was still around, they would talk about the effect of partisan signalling on public opinion polls. Said signalling is, to put it simply, the idea that a certain amount of the response to a poll is independent of what the respondent might actually think about the question, but is geared towards expressing their support, or lack thereof, for a person or party.

Perhaps the most common example of this is are people's economic expectations.

The fundamentals of the United States' economy didn't change precisely on January 20th of last year. And it's worth noting that both sets of partisans got it wrong... and were likely to; there's pretty much no chance that inflation was ever going to drop to near zero. 4% turned out to be closer to the reality of last year, but not by much, considering that the average was somewhere in the 2.65% range. Given this, "How much do you like the current (or incoming) Administration's handling of the economy would likely have been a much better question to ask.

Likewise with a recent article from Axios on the Administration's Greenland policy. There's nothing intrinsic to either Democratic or Republican ideology about Greenland.

So it seems pretty evident that this is really a poll about support for the President himself, which means that a high level of partisan skew is to be expected. And it would be, even if the question concerned people's view of Donald Trump tying his shoes.

Maybe it's just me, but the high levels of partisan signalling that one would expect renders such questions somewhat pointless. Why not simply ask the question that it's understood that people are actually asking?