In response to my post earlier this afternoon on new polling numbers for the DISCLOSE Act, The Center For Competitive Politics’s Jeff Patch has supplied me with
“„Regarding your post, I guess I take your point that the poll questions weren’t uniformly positive in terms of supporting our ideology. I thought that was evident, not something we were hiding or “spinning.”
“„Nonetheless, a couple points:
“„(1) Our observation that DISCLOSE doesn’t enjoy the support many reform groups claim is not based mainly on the disclosure questions; it’s based on question 8 (and 5 to a lesser extent) showing that 56 percent of likely voters think interest groups should be free to spend money on politics. This contrasts with the WaPo poll and others showing large majorities opposed to CU when using wording about corporations or corruption. The post doesn’t even address that issue, which is still a huge part of DISCLOSE. Despite The Hill report that Schumer is considering stripping the non-disclosure provisions, they still remain and we’ve heard of no outreach whatsoever on these issues to moderate Republicans.
“„(2) Our assertion isn’t that people oppose disclosure, it’s that they’re more skeptical than commonly believed. We freely acknowledge that the disclosure threshold provision question (9) is mixed, but this goes to the point that there’s not overwhelming support for the DISCLOSE provisions, not that the public is uniformly opposed to them. As you note, if we were trying to skew the results, we wouldn’t have even released question 10, which shows that Americans support some level of informational disclosure.