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A Telling Statistic: 49 Percent of Republicans Don't Know What GOP Stands For

By Dustin Rowles | Posted Under Miscellaneous | Comments (27)

herman_cain.jpg

According to AP:

Forty-nine percent of people who identify themselves as Republicans don’t know what their party’s other common designation — GOP — stands for, according to a new Vanity Fair / CBS News poll.

The survey of 1,165 adults nationwide found that 51 percent of Republicans correctly knew GOP stands for “Grand Old Party.”

The next highest number, 34 percent, thought it meant “Government of the People.” Five percent said it was “Grumpy Old People” and 5 percent said they didn’t know. Four percent think it means “God’s Own Party” and 1 percent think it’s “Gauntlet of Power.”










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Comments

I'm pretty sure we'd ALL be Republicans if it stood for "Gauntlet of Power."

Posted by: space oddity at November 3, 2011 10:03 AM

I love the GOP (Gaunlet of Power). It's so bad.

Posted by: Socrates_Johnson at November 3, 2011 10:12 AM

GAUNTLET OF POWER - Artifact (5)
As Gauntlet of Power enters the battlefield, choose a color.
Creatures of the chosen color get +1/+1.
Whenever a basic land is tapped for mana of the chosen color, its controller adds one mana of that color to his or her mana pool (in addition to the mana the land produces).


Great. Now I'm going to have to spend money to build a republican deck of some kind. And then a liberal deck for balance.
Fucking Pajiba.

Posted by: superasente at November 3, 2011 10:27 AM

Huh. I could have sworn it stood for Genocide Of Progress.

Posted by: Paultera at November 3, 2011 10:29 AM

the republicans have gone bat shit crazy and while everyone is focusing on that the democrats have lost sight of sanity as well.... too bad for us....

Posted by: Greg at November 3, 2011 10:43 AM

A) That card seem like it could be awesome.
B) Go with Red/Black for the Republicans. I made a red/black deck that was probably the best I ever did. Dems, I dunno, probably Blue/Green. I'm a bit attached to 2 color decks. Also in the 15 or so years since I've played Magic: The Gathering, it has probably changed a good bit.

Posted by: Socrates_Johnson at November 3, 2011 10:47 AM

So, is this film better for netflix or should I see it in the theater?

Posted by: VK at November 3, 2011 10:50 AM

Kinda misleading. The AP article also goes on to say that only 38% of Dems that answered the poll got the GOP question right. Plus, for God's sake, the sample size is only a thousand people. Not much of a representation of the almost 400 million in this country. Just sayin'.

Posted by: toomin at November 3, 2011 11:15 AM

@toomin According to people smarter than me, you only need around 1500-2000 people to get within +/- 5% accuracy, no matter how large the sample they're representing. At a certain point, the amount of people you ask stops being a factor as the percentages will stop moving, especially when the options for responses are limited.

Anyway, that's what I learned at a liberal arts college.

Posted by: RobP at November 3, 2011 11:34 AM

The confidence interval for 51% a sample of 1000 people from a population of 400 million responding a certain way is 3.1. So there's a 95% chance that the real number of Republicans who can correctly identify what GOP stand for is between 47.9% and 54.1%.

I might be misapplying the math (though I obviously don't think I am) but a 1000 person sample from the US population isn't too bad. The AP should have reported the margin of error to make that clear though.

It's disappointing that even fewer Democrats know what GOP stands for, but at least it's not their party.

Posted by: Socrates_Johnson at November 3, 2011 11:41 AM

More importantly, what the hell does GOOP stand for?!

Posted by: Jast at November 3, 2011 11:47 AM

G- Gwyneth
O-?
O-?
P-Profits!

Posted by: becks at November 3, 2011 11:54 AM

Was there an official point where this site became the lite version of the DailyKos/Huffington Post?

This has fuck all to do with what now?

Stick to movies, Rowles, it's what your best at. Leave the partisan hackery to the partisan hacks.

Posted by: Some Guy at November 3, 2011 12:12 PM

I'm not surprised. That's what a liberal education system gets you.

Posted by: , at November 3, 2011 12:24 PM

Not to give them too much credit (Republican voters), but I'm pretty sure most Democrats couldn't tell you what "GOP" stands for, either.

Unfortunately, ignorance in this country is non-partisan.

RE toomin: What RobP said. A research person explained it to me as the "law of diminishing returns." The amount of money that it takes to poll/survey more people (say, 10,000 total) gets you only minimally more accurate results. It actually costs quite a bit of money to do research. Real research, not those people who hang out at the mall with a clipboard, trying to solicit shoppers for a survey.

Posted by: Slash at November 3, 2011 12:32 PM

Wait, it's not just pronounced gop? Man, do I feel like an idiot.

Posted by: googergieger at November 3, 2011 1:40 PM

I always want to think of it as the Good Ole Party, like the good ole boys who make up such a big chunk of it.

I think we need to found the Gauntlet of Power party, RIGHT NOW. Who wants to help me come up with a platform?

Posted by: Angeleno Ewok at November 3, 2011 2:23 PM

@toomin you can get a pretty good idea of how a whole pot of soup tastes by stirring it up and trying one spoon full. And if you've got a random sample then you can know just how accurate a representation of the whole population a poll like that is.

For those who want to do the math it's a pretty simple formula. Let's assume we're interested in being right 95% of the time. And let's say we want to err on the side of being more accurate rather than less. Given a sample size of N, the range that we can expect the true proportion to be at least 95% of the time is:

Sample estimate +/- (.5 * .5 / N)^.5 * 1.96

So with that sample of 1065 giving an estimate of 51% that gives:

0.51 +/- (.5 * .5 /1065)^.5 * 1.96
0.51 +/- .0300

That means that if this was a random sample of Republicans in the US then true percentage is between 48% and 54%. So I wouldn't come to any conclusions about "more republicans than not don't know what GOP means" because there's a reasonable chance that it's less than 50%, but that's still a whole heck of a lot of Republicans.

Double the cost of your operation and call up 2130 people and that goes to a range of 48.9% to 53.1%. Worth it? Maybe. Maybe not. People seem to be pretty happy with a +/- 3 point 95% confidence interval so the ~1000 person sample has become something of a standard.

Want to be 99% certain instead of a measly 95%? Replace the 1.96 with 2.58. These numbers come from a little something called the "normal distribution" that even fancier math can be used to show that these percentages follow. Plugging that into a calculator, if you want to be wrong less than 1% of the time you'd say that the true percentage was between 47% and 55%.

Now, trying to make up for getting all computational up in here, I present my favorite statistics joke. A frequentist is somebody whose greatest goal in life is to be wrong only 5% of the time. A Bayesian is someone who, vaguely expecting a horse and catching a glimpse of an ass, strongly believes he's see a mule.

Yes, I carry around a slide rule.

Posted by: Z at November 3, 2011 3:31 PM

I'm a bit too happy that Z just validated my nerd cred.

Posted by: Socrates_Johnson at November 3, 2011 4:23 PM

Hahaha! Republicans are stupid! That was your point, right? These daily reminders that the people I disagree with are stupid have been really helpful for my self-esteem! Keep 'em comin'!

Posted by: John at November 3, 2011 5:22 PM

OMG, a liberal (DR) points out how dumb Repubs are then fails to mention Dems are dumber.

/shocked

At least I know what DNC stands for. It's Dickheads, Nutjobs, and Crackheads right
?

Posted by: the EPA at November 3, 2011 6:25 PM

And while we're on the topic of statistics: the current population of the Unites States is around 312 million, not "almost 400 million" as previously stated.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

Posted by: spoobnooble at November 3, 2011 6:39 PM

Was there an official point where this site became the lite version of the DailyKos/Huffington Post?

This has fuck all to do with what now?

@SomeGuy, I don't know about "official" but it kicked in shortly after DR started his byline in that other pub. Could be coincidence, covariance or causation - no way to tell.

Posted by: BierceAmbrose at November 3, 2011 8:06 PM

Eh, says miscellaneous

The fact that one side doesn't know what the other side's acronym means is not nearly as telling as the actual group's not knowing, no matter how you spin it.

Hell, most of these people don't even know what Republican and Democrat mean.

Posted by: Protoguy at November 3, 2011 10:34 PM

And I'm betting that all the people who said God's Own Party also think that Betty Bowers is a real person and take her seriously.

Posted by: Jerry at November 4, 2011 12:41 AM

Ah, the daily liberal self congratulatory pat on the back.. ridiculing others why never turning the same lens to focus on themselves. You must feel so proud in that little bubble of seeming self superiority and blatant hate and disdain. Movies, Brah... Movies.

Posted by: Mup at November 4, 2011 3:33 PM

Unsurprised. And I'd bet that majorities of both party memberships couldn't correctly name the party of current and historical politicians, or their policies.

Posted by: idiosynchronic at November 5, 2011 12:30 PM