The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance is out with a new poll and as usual it’s gazing up helplessly at worthless but I have a great idea – Mass Fiscal should hire me as its pollster! I’m definitely qualified.
At the end of every semester at UMass Boston the students get a chance to fill out forms to evaluate the course and the faculty member. I’m not one to take chances so when I hand out the forms I instruct the students “Remember if you liked the course my name is Professor Cunningham but it if you didn’t like it my name is Professor Watanabe.” I don’t know how my dear colleague Professor Paul Watanabe feels about my methodology but it works great for me. More to the point, the question framing is pretty much what MassFiscal does in its latest “poll.”
You can find the poll at the Fiscal Alliance Foundation website here and here is the link to the toplines.
Anyway the poll is supposed to be asking about attitudes to the real estate tax proposed by Governor Baker, but the framing is so loaded that it’s useless. Here’s an example of this two question “poll.”
A new report was released by the Tax Foundation that shows Massachusetts has the fifth highest state and local tax collections per capita in the country, only behind NY, NJ, ND, and CT. Do you think a Republican Governor should be proposing new and higher taxes or should he be holding the line on taxes and spending?
Or try this one:
Would you have a more favorable or less favorable opinion of your lawmaker if they supported a 50% tax increase to the real estate excise tax, which would drive up the cost of housing by $1B over the next 10 years?
Not much different than the Cunningham/Watanabe methodology, is it?
Mass Fiscal has an unblemished record of phony polls. Remember the MassFiscal Fraud Poll that earned the organization the 2015 Award for Fraud in Massachusetts Politics? Or its 2017 Pinocchio Poll?
In fairness the poll might be useful for message testing but that isn’t what MassFiscal is doing here. It’s presenting this as an accurate gauge of what voters in a few legislative districts think of Baker’s proposal. But it isn’t. Yet if any media outlets bite on this – and they will – mission accomplished. As W.C. Fields said, never smarten up a chump.
If Mass Fiscal really wanted to do a legitimate poll there are good pollsters right here in Boston – Steve Koczela at MassInc and David Paleologos at Suffolk University to name just two. But if Mass Fiscal just wants to release polls with pre-determined results based on loaded questions, I can do that and I work cheap.
You are not Professor Wantanabe. That’s a false statement.
I’m assuming — for the sake of argument — the two MFA statements are factually correct.
Maybe Mississippi and Montana have higher state & local tax collections, but I doubt it and that does not appear to be what your argument is.
Yes, the MFA wording affect the answer, but so do the NEA’s wording about how we aren’t meeting some purported baseline budget funding level.
In both cases, the polls need to be read in the context of “in light of knowing X, what do you think about Y?” It’s relevant because you’d better believe X is going to be screamed from the rafters in any discussion of Y.
Great tosee you commenting Dr. Ed. Keep ’em coming.