Opinions expressed on the Whig Blog, in the Forums and in comments are those of the individual authors and do not necessarilly represent positions of the Modern Whig Party. The ability to post opinion pieces and comments is not restricted to Whig members (although blog entries are by invitation.) These items are not pre-screened but are subject to our Terms of Use. Please Contact Us or Ask a Question if you have concerns about the content.
Firstly, I want to thank everyone for the many well-thought comments on my previous article on this particular topic. I'm glad it caused so much good debate and discussion! Now back to our previously scheduled blogging..
Well, at long last, we have a national poll that gives us our first good glimpse at what support this Occupy movement has gained, now five weeks into the movement's existence. The poll is question was carried out by the Associated Press-GfK, in which they asked 1,000 adults between October 13-17.
The results of the poll are that 37% of those polled said they support the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I think is a pretty fair number considering the relatively young age of this movement (just 5 weeks or so old). More importantly, the poll also gave us a ideological breakdown of the supporters of this movement.
Not surprisingly, (to me anyway), 64% of the OWS supporters identified themselves as Democrats, 22% identified themselves as Independents, and 14% identified themselves as Republicans. While the numbers for Democrats and Independents didn't surprise me much, the number of identified Republicans in the poll did.
Some other useful date from this poll includes the following:
1. 68% of respondents agreed that former President Bush deserves "almost all" or "a lot but not all" the blame for the current economic downturn.
2. 15% of respondents agreed that President Obama deserves the blame for the current economic downturn.
3. Nearly 6 in 10 respondents blame Congressional Republicans for the current economic downturn.
4. 60% of respondents Democrats more than Republicans to create jobs
NOTE: the numbers above are a breakdown of those who DO support the OWS, not the total number of respondents.
As suggested by the above note, this poll didn't focus on the OWS alone and covered A LOT of ground, too much for me to discuss in full in this post so I decided to focus just on the OWS relevant numbers.
Now while these numbers are the first good glimpse of what kind of support the OWS has to date, as always this is just ONE poll, and one poll does not make a trend. We will need more polls in the near future to be able to safely gauge what kind of support this movement really has with the average American, but my thanks to the AP and GfK for providing us with some initial numbers.
Here are the two main links for this article. One is discussing the OWS aspect of the poll, the other about the full and entire poll done by the AP-GfK:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_AP_POLL_WALL_STREET_PROTESTS?S...
http://ap-gfkpoll.com/uncategorized/latest-ap-gfk-poll-findings
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this work as solely those of the author and not that of the Modern Whig Party or any other political organization.
Here is another poll taken of some of the people in OWS. Given the source I don't know how trustworthy or what biases are present. It was also a small sample, about 200 it says. As with any poll of this nature, take it with a grain of salt and use it for a jumping off point for further research.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020447950457663708296574536...
The poll was taken by a former Democratic pollster according to the note at the bottom of the article.
Theme by Danetsoft and Danang Probo Sayekti inspired by Maksimer
