Most Republicans in Arizona want their governor to kill a bill that would make it legal to discriminate against gay people. A political number cruncher figures out how many women there are at the Academy Awards. Rasmussen measures how much people hate clowns. Today is Tuesday, February 25, 2014. This is HuffPollster.
ARIZONA GOP FAVORS VETO OF SB1062 – Jim Small: “A Phoenix political consulting firm commissioned a poll yesterday that shows more than twice as many likely Republican voters in Arizona want Gov. Jan Brewer to veto SB1062 as want her to sign it. Coleman Dahm, a Republican political consulting firm in Phoenix, did an automated poll of 802 Republicans. When asked about the bill, 57.1% of Republican respondents said they would like Brewer to veto it. Only 27.6% of those polled want her to sign SB1062. The rest, 15.3%, didn’t have an opinion. There is a +/- 4 percentage point error range for the poll. Since last week, Arizona has been in the news all over the country because of a controversial bill. Many people say it will let businesses discriminate against gay people based on their religious beliefs.” [Arizona Capitol Times]
The question’s wording – Coleman Dahm gave HuffPost the question text: “Should Governor Brewer veto Senate Bill 1062, which changes and expands the state’s definition of “exercise of religion”? This bill gives people, businesses, and corporations the right to refuse service to someone based on their religious beliefs.”
Obama’s data technology is taken down by “Project Ivy.” Zeke Miller: “Monday, the Democratic National Committee announced a new plan to give Democratic candidates across the country access to the same high-tech data tools that were used by the Obama campaign. The project, called “Project Ivy,” will take out of storage many of the high-tech data, analytics, and communication tools that the Obama campaign used. This will allow Democratic candidates from school board to Senate to use them. The project is built on top of the party’s long-running Votebuilder database, which has detailed information on more than 200 million Americans and was put together over the course of more than a decade of political work.” [Time]
THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE “WOMAN PROBLEM” AT THE OSCARS – Amelia Showalter, former Director of Digital Analytics for the 2012 Obama campaign: “Since I work with numbers for a living, I decided to compare nominations for best actor and best picture over the past 80 years to see if any patterns emerged. The differences between men and women were surprising. First, I noticed that actresses, not actors, are more likely to be nominated for performances in movies that aren’t nominated for best picture. In general, the Academy doesn’t think much of movies where women play important roles. Also, among the movies that do get nominated for best picture, movies about women have a much lower chance of winning. Zero Dark Thirty and Black Swan, for example, were good enough in their years to make it to the final round. But they joined a long line of movies with actresses at the centre that didn’t do well. In other words, the problem isn’t just that too few movies about women are made in Hollywood (and therefore smaller raw numbers of potential nominees). It’s that even among the few films that meet the Academy’s nomination requirements, the success rate for movies about women is much lower than the success rate for movies about men. The data show that the Academy doesn’t care much about women’s stories.” [Newsweek]