Very confusing numbers about what’s going on in Wisconsin. Rasmussen Reports says 48 percent of likely voters nationwide are siding with Gov. Scott Walker, while 38 percent are supporting the unions. Two other polls didn’t try to screen for voters at all, and have very different results. According to We Ask America, an automated polling outfit, 2,400 Wisconsin residents disapprove of Walker’s actions by a margin of 52-43 (though they disapproved of legislators’ fleeing the state 57-39). And today Gallup reports that in a poll of 1,000 adults, 61 percent said they would oppose “a law in your state taking away some collective bargaining rights of most public unions, including the state teachers union.”
This is fascinating, though not for the reasons you might think upon first glance. At this moment, 11.9 percent of the workforce in the United States is unionized. In the private sector, the number is even more startling: 6.9 percent. Indeed, the percentage of Americans who have ever been in a union has declined so precipitously in the past 30 years that it probably numbers no more than 20 percent overall. Which raises the question: How many people whom Gallup polled actually know what is meant, in public-policy terms, by the words “collective bargaining rights”?
[...] John Podhoretz wants to know how many people even know what collective bargaining is. [...]
[...] John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine asks the correct question: “How many people whom Gallup polled actually know what is meant, in [...]