“I don’t look at it, for no other reason than that Mark Penn is the director of it,” said Stephen Clermont, the polling director at Change Polls. Many are resentful at the boost in credibility his survey gets from having “Harvard” in headlines instead of a long-divisive political operative’s name. That’s partly what this is about: Harris is Mark Penn’s poll, and Penn’s own punditry has critics even more skeptical about his numbers. “It requires that we put a lot of trust into the name Mark Penn.”

“Translating non-representative interviews into something representative is dependent on not just whether the sample was weighted, but on the overall rigor of the process,” said Mark Blumenthal, a pollster who consults for YouGov. December’s poll asked whether “university presidents today in general are showing the right leadership needed for our young people,” and whether “women’s groups have adequately condemned crimes against women committed by Hamas.” (The answer, for 64% and 51% of respondents respectively, was “no.”) One is that the questions, ripped from the headlines, show a country fired up and opinionated about every issue crossing the news desk. As The Bulwark’s Will Saletan noted, other polls have found significantly less sympathy for Hamas among young people.Ĭritics tend to cite the same issues with Harris numbers. New polling from the New York Times and Siena College has found younger Americans more supportive of a ceasefire, with 67% of voters under 30 agreeing that “should stop its military campaign in order to protect against civilian casualties, even if Hamas has not been fully eliminated.”īut Penn’s polling has gone much further, asking an online panel dozens of questions about the conflict, including “do you support more Israel or more Hamas?” Its results showed half of Americans under 25 siding with a terrorist organization, data since cited by Vivek Ramaswamy and other Republicans as evidence that online propaganda, from TikTok and other sources, was poisoning young minds. That there’s a generation gap over Israel is clear. (Panelists can get gift cards for their participation.) One potential explanation for why certain people have diametrically opposed answers, for example, might be that they’re clicking “yes” on the first thing they see after fielding dozens of questions in a row, many of them on unfamiliar topics.

Covering the results, the Times of Israel called the responses “muddled.”įindings like these have baffled other pollsters, who question how Penn’s polling operation builds its samples (weighted “where necessary,” according to language in each polling memo), and how it keeps respondents engaged through a long battery of political questions answered online.

The same December survey that found 60% of 18-24 year olds believed Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza found 70% also believed Israel was “trying to avoid civilian casualties.” Majorities of 18-24 year olds apparently think that all of Israel should be surrendered to Hamas (51% agree) - but also that Hamas is a group that “would like to commit genocide” (58% agree) and should be “removed from running Gaza” (58% agree as well). “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.”Ĭritics note that the results often seem bizarrely inconsistent. “It’s tough for me to take the findings at face value,” said Lakshya Jain, a partner at Split Ticket.

Nytimes election polls 2016