ABC News/Ipsos Poll: More About a Soundbite Than Public Opinion

David W. Moore

ABC's headline (1/30/22) is based on one polling question that gave a reason to oppose Biden's promise and no reason to support it.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll (1/30/22) is a poster child for what is wrong with many media-sponsored polls these days. Instead of a serious effort to measure what the public is thinking about any specific issue, the poll glides superficially across a whole range of subjects, never stopping long enough to provide understanding of any one of them—creating an illusion of public opinion that is either misleading, biased or simply inaccurate.

(In this article, I focus on just one of the 11 issues covered—what President Joe Biden should do about a Supreme Court opening. In a future piece, I will deal with the other ten issues.)

The poll asked respondents:

To fill the opening in the Supreme Court, do you think Joe Biden should:

1. Consider all possible nominees

2. Consider only nominees who are Black women as he has pledged to do

The results show 76% for all possible nominees, 23% for a Black woman.

The ABC headline announces, “Majority of Americans Want Biden to Consider ‘All Possible Nominees’ for Supreme Court Vacancy.”

The story itself notes that “President Joe Biden’s campaign trail vow to select a Black woman to fill a high-court vacancy without reviewing all potential candidates evokes a sharply negative reaction from voters.”

That’s it. There are no questions that probe how many people even knew there was a Supreme Court opening, or whether people were aware of what Biden’s promise was, or why he might have made the promise, or what people might know about the historical record of Black women serving on the Supreme Court.

For people who are clueless about the issue, the single question pitted an implicit standard of fairness (“all possible nominees”) versus what on the surface seems to be an unfair advantage to Black women. Without context, the poll results provide us no insight into what people are thinking when it comes to the historical record of racial and sexual bias, and whether/how it should be addressed.

If ABC was determined to pursue a superficial approach to this issue, its one question could have been more objective:

To fill the opening in the Supreme Court, President Biden has promised to nominate a Black woman. Do you agree or disagree with that decision, or don’t you have an opinion one way or the other?

1. Agree

2. Disagree

3. No opinion

That question still provides no context for the respondent, but at least it is balanced. The ABC question gives a reason why one might oppose Biden’s promise, but provides no balancing reason why one should support it. The revised question provides no reason either to support or to oppose the question.

A better revised question might be to add this qualifier after “nominate a Black woman”: “…who would be the first Black woman ever nominated.”

With either question wording, the results almost certainly would have been much different from what ABC reported.

In addition, the poll should follow up with an intensity question—whether people hold those views strongly or not. For many respondents, their opinions are simply top-of-mind, nothing they have considered seriously and thus easily subject to change.

To understand public opinion, it’s imperative to know how many Americans really care about an issue, and how many really don’t care one way or the other. ABC found that 99% had an “opinion,” though certainly many of those people were not actually engaged on the issue.

There are other ways to approach the matter. If ABC wanted to explore the public’s view in greater depth, it could have asked:

Which comes closer to your point of view:

1. Biden should look at all possible qualified nominees, regardless of race or gender.

2. Biden should nominate a Black woman for the Supreme Court, because no Black woman has ever been nominated despite many who were qualified

3. Or are you unsure

Again, intensity questions should follow.

In addition, the poll could have tested some pieces of knowledge after the initial question, to see how respondents might react if they knew, for example, that former presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both promised that they would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. Would that information have changed respondents’ opinions or not?

In short, there were several ways ABC could have explored public opinion on this issue in an objective way, had the network genuinely wanted to understand what the public was thinking. But ABC chose to ask just the one (biased) question, so it could move on to more superficial questions about other issues.

And instead of an insight into public opinion on the Supreme Court opening, ABC gives us only a partisan soundbite.

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