LockeColeMA wrote:
I don't care much about whatever you're debating here, but how are you doing your math?
Lol! Badly apparently. Honestly don't know how I managed that.
It's still a smaller total spread though (only a couple points though, so to be fair, they are similar). But that's because the middle group is so large relatively speaking. Here's the thing though. We know that the split can't be even because in the same poll, the group identified as Democrats makes up 46%. If we assume that every single Liberal is a Democrat (not necessarily a valid assumption btw), then that means that 23% out of the 36% making up the Moderate group must be self identified Democrats. That only leaves 13% who can even possibly "lean" the other direction.
And that precludes any liberals not identifying as Democrats, and also precludes any conservatives identifying as Democrats. I've already gone over this in a previous post. It's not really the ideological numbers which matter, since "conservative" can mean many different things to different people. As several people have observed, the label conservative is much more popular than the label liberal. Since the question at hand is approval for a leader of a political party, it's the political party ratio which matters more.
I haven't looked them up, but I'd be willing to bet that the ideological skew represented in the AP poll isn't that far off from what it is in Rasmussen polls (or other polls for that matter). But their skew in favor of Democrats absolutely is far far off from other polls. That's the point. You look for an outlier. It's pretty normal for "conservative" and "moderate" to make up the majority ideologically, with "liberal" trailing behind. But most polls asking about party affiliation come up with a pretty even ~33% split between Republican, Democrat, and "other/wont say".
The AP polls sample of 46% Democrats is absolutely too high. And that's absolutely relevant to a question concerning the leader of the Democratic Party. That's kinda all that matters.