At Yearly Kos, along with Mystery Pollster and MoveOn.org, on behalf of BlogPac I was proud to release a poll of the netroots that sampled, by far, the widest universe of netroots activists ever surveyed by a scientifically random study. I posted the results of the survey in two parts, part one and part two, shortly thereafter. Unlike the famous and excellent Pew study of Dean activists, which only looked at Democracy for America members, and unlike the Blogads readers survey, which is not scientifically random, our poll randomly sampled 2,000 members of MoveOn.org, which provided us with a universe of 3.3 million members.

Now, I write this not to take anything away from the Pew survey, Which was an outstanding survey of the universe it sampled. However, considering the size of the universe for the BlogPac survey and the particular questions we asked, our survey is by far the best publicly available information on what the netroots want from the Democratic Party and what they want from Democratic candidates.

I preface this article with a discussion of this survey because of a recent article by Scott Winship in The American Prospect: No End of Ideology: Netroots members insist that they're non-ideological pragmatists. They're wrong. . In this article, he frames the debate over the netroots as follows:The netroots community portrays itself as non-ideological but rabidly partisan pragmatists whose only goal is to put Democrats back in power. To their critics, netroots activists are amateurish ideologues whose across-the-board liberalism will drive the party off a cliff. During the course of his article, Scott clearly takes sides with the latter position. As much as I like Scott and look forward to working with him in the future, when it comes to this issue he could not be more wrong.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a response to an early prototype of Scott Winship's American Prospect article on MyDD. My article, Netroots Revealed: Looking for Inspiration, pointed out that many of the findings in our poll directly contradicted ideas that Scott was trying to indirectly infer from the Pew study. Specifically, in response to the charge that the netroots are trying to create an ideologically rigid leftist Democratic Party, I pointed out the results of three of our questions:







In other words, the BlogPac netroots study directly asked a wide universe of netroots activists whether or not Scott's conclusions about the netroots were true. The overwhelming response was "no." Netroots activists do not only want left-wing policy and ideology from Democratic candidates. The netroots do not only support left wing candidates. Above and beyond ideology, the netroots are looking for different factors when it comes to candidate support.

Now, Scott and I had been engaging in an email discussion about this ever since his first post went up, and that discussion continued all the way until the time when he posted his piece in the American Prospect. The long and the short of that discussion was that he was not going to use data from the BlogPac survey because we only had a 7% response rate. Thus, he went ahead and continued to try and make his argument using a much smaller universe of netroots activists in the Pew study, and basing his theory on questions in that study that did not directly relate to his conclusions. In fact, in his American Prospect article, there is not a single mention of the BlogPac netroots study. I find this disappointing, to say the least. To disregard the best existing evidence that directly relates to his conclusions makes his entire case flimsy, at best, and dishonest at worst. Further, for those in the know, a 7% response rate is not out of the normal range for telephone responses these days. Still further, considering that this was an email survey (the only way to reach netroots activists), one should not expect a high response rate. In fact, when conducting the poll, we were expecting something around 7%. Simply put, people answer their phones a lot more often than they open their email. Anyway, does Scott somehow believe that if this survey had a 20% response rate that the overwhelming margins by which his conclusions were opposed in the poll (73%--24% and 78%--19%) would somehow be reversed? That is preposterous.

I am a member of the advisory board of Scott's publication, The Democratic Strategist, but when it comes to this topic Scott is just flat out wrong. Worse, he is ignoring public evidence of which he is aware that directly contradicts his conclusions, and is doing so without good reason. The reason I post about this is because of something he writes at the beginning of his article:Tuesday's Connecticut primary race between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont is not about the netroots. The outcome will be a referendum on Lieberman's Iraq stance, his coziness with President Bush, and his attention to his constituents, as well as Lamont's qualifications. But you can bet that if Lieberman loses, both the netroots -- the online activists organized around political blogs -- and their moderate critics will agree that the netroots community is responsible. He is certainly right that the establishment media narrative will try to pin a Lieberman defeat on a bunch of crazy left wing bloggers, a narrative that is itself crazy. The credit should go to Ned Lamont, his excellent staff, the broader progressive movement, the voters of Connecticut, and Lieberman's terrible campaign. However, when the narrative is constructed, it will try to make the exact same case that Scott makes: that "netroots activists are amateurish ideologues whose across-the-board liberalism will drive the party off a cliff. " I also believe that when this narrative is fomented, they will probably end up citing Scott's work to make their case. If this happens, I have no idea if this is something of which Scott will approve. Either way, it needs to be made clear right now, before the primary takes place that Scott's conclusions are wrong and are contradicted by the best available public information me have on the progressive netroots.

Now, as the BlogPac poll showed, there are indeed people who fit Scott's description, but they form a 15-20% minority within the netroots. It is entirely possible that the Pew study oversampled these people, but it is in now way possible to argue that Lamont's supporters among the netroots come largely from that segment. MoveOn.org, the same organization whose members we surveyed for the BlogPac netroots study, conducted a vote among their Connecticut membership on the Senate primary. By a vote of 85-14, Ned Lamont won the MoveOn.org nomination. Clearly, Lamont's supporters are coming from a wide swath of the netroots that includes many types of people. I also find it interesting that 14% of MoveOn.org voters sided with Lieberman, which shows once again that the netroots is not a monolithic entity. As Mark Schimdt wrote in his American Prospect response to Scott, the netroots does not think with one mind. It would be wrong for anyone to describe the netroots as one thing, no matter if the person doing the describing is Markos, Scott, or myself. The type of people Scott describes do exist within the netroots, but Lieberman supporters also exist within the netroots. The salient difference is that I am describing the majority of the progressive netroots, and as such I believe that is the only way they can be fairly described when they are discussed in over-generalized terms, as will frequently be the case in the days following August 8th.