I can appreciate how difficult it must be for a news outlet like the Associated Press to find new and interesting things to write about when it comes to the presidential campaign. For that matter, I can even appreciate that, once in a while, a story with a human-interest angle might help break things up a bit.
But as part of my ongoing fascination with the AP’s coverage of the campaign, I’m afraid this item is just silly.
If the presidential election goes to the dogs, John McCain is looking like best in show.
From George Washington’s foxhound “Drunkard” to George W. Bush’s terriers “Barney” and “Miss Beazley,” pets are a longtime presidential tradition for which the presumed Republican nominee seems well prepared, with more than a dozen.
The apparent Democratic nominee Barack Obama, on the other hand, doesn’t have a pet at home. The pet-owning public seems to have noticed the difference. An AP-Yahoo! News poll found that pet owners favor McCain over Obama 42 percent to 37 percent, with dog owners particularly in McCain’s corner.
The AP quoted one person saying, “I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person — caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners,” and found another willing to argue on the record that if a person owns a pet that “tells you that they’re responsible at least for something, for the care of something.”
Now, as a rule, when I get to the part to the part of a story that reads, “The poll was conducted over the Internet…” I pretty much discount the rest of the content, but this poll and related story are even worse than the usual palaver.
For one thing, the AP notes that the public “seems to have noticed the difference” between the Obama family’s “petless” existence and the McCain family’s dogs. But really, how many Americans really know any of this? I follow the news pretty closely, and I had no idea how many pets, if any, the candidates have. There’s no evidence at all that voters “have noticed” anything of the sort.
Mark Blumenthal went on to explain in some detail why this report is useless.
As Gallup tells us, Obama leads by a whopping 24 points among those age 18-29, while the race is much closer among those over 30.
And what about pet ownership by party affiliation? Or income? As Demmoinesdem points out, these potentially confounding variables may also be at work. And that strong possibility reminds us of the lesson that all pollsters are supposed to learn in their first statistics class: Correlation is not causation. Pet owners may prefer McCain for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the candidates own pets.
But that lesson is largely lost in this piece, because in the lead of the story — and who knows how many local television news pieces run as a result — strongly implies just the opposite.
In other words, go ahead and ignore the poll and the story. It’s a real dog.