LITTLE ROCK — A majority of respondents in a nationwide poll commissioned by two University of Arkansas System groups said they believe they will see a female president within their lifetimes.
Despite some polling data that suggest bias against women among portions of all age and demographic groups, 77 percent of men and 80 percent of women polled believe the United States will elect a female president, researchers from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Diane D. Blair Center for Southern Politics and Society said.
The computer poll - sponsored in partnership with UA’s Clinton School of Public Service - assembled responses from 3,600 respondents randomly selected by polling firm GfK to mimic demographic patterns detected in the 2010 Census. The poll, conducted in mid-December, has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.
“We didn’t ask if people wanted a female president. We asked if they believed they would see one,” UA assistant professor Pearl Ford-Dowe said after revealing the preliminary poll results Wednesday at the Clinton School.
In separate questions, the poll compared support for a frequently mentioned potential Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, with three potential Republican challengers for the 2016 election, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Poll respondents, who were not aware of what groups had commissioned the research, preferred Clinton in all three matchups, the researchers said.
“There is strong nation-wide support for Hillary Clinton,” said UA assistant professor Rafael Jimeno. “If these results hold over the next few years, she will be in a strong position to run for president if she chooses to.”
Blair Center Director Todd Shields said it’s possible there could have been some bias in the poll because respondents answered questions soon after the 2012 election.
Poll participants sometimes say they voted for the winner of an election even if they voted for the opponent because people like to support winners, he said. That bias could have affected the likelihood of selecting a Democrat in a poll, he said, because the winner of the 2012 presidential election is a Democrat.
But surveying online provides a stronger sense of anonymity, making respondents more likely to answer honestly, Shields said.
Wednesday’s discussion was the first public event centered on the poll results. The Clinton School and the Blair Center plan to roll out several more sets of data analyses over the next year, exploring racial, cultural and economic issues with a special focus on Southern attitudes.
The two campuses spent $75,000 in privately raised funds to commission the poll.
Respondents were selected from GfK’s proprietary database that features a representative sample of Americans. The polling company outfits participants with portable computers and Internet access, allowing it to draw opinions from “underrepresented groups,” such as people without cell phones and people who couldn’t otherwise afford a computer, Shields said.
The Clinton School-Blair Center poll oversampled from the South - defined as the 11 states that previously made up the Confederacy - so that researchers could further explore attitudes within the region, he said.
“We’re able to talk about attitudes of people in the South with accuracy that no one else has,” Shields said.
That Southern sample was scaled down to more accurately represent the region’s size relative to the rest of the country when researchers compiled national results, they said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 02/07/2013