The Massachusetts Republican Party on Thursday invited its supporters to take a survey which it says will help the party “craft the Platform which will be presented at our state convention in March”. The survey asks respondents to decide whether the 2014 platform should include any of the following “issue statements”. I’ve highlighted just a few of the most nonsensical entries:
Rollback Income Tax to 5%
Mandate Term Limits for Legislators
Support a Change to the Local Aid Formula
Oppose Instituting a National School Board
Support School Choice
Support Helping Those Individuals Who Are Disabled
Oppose the Affordable Care Act
Oppose Further Gun Control Efforts
Support Mandatory Sentences
Support the Pledge of Allegiance in Schools
Support the Death Penalty
Support House Republican Efforts on Immigration Reform
Respect for Life from Conception to Natural Death
Support a Traditional Definition of Marriage
Combat Human Trafficking
Oppose Indexing Tax Increases to Inflation
Support Energy Independence
Support Religious Liberty
Gee, they forgot to ask about supporting Mom and apple pie. The survey is so poorly written that even MassGOP diehards are complaining:
Mr. Cunningham [MassGOP executive director] said that the wording was supposed to reflect how the party talks about things. It sounded like he meant at the national level – which I don’t care about here in MA. (If you think the Republicans from the gay marriage state need to talk about the issue like the ones down south do, you’ve already lost me.)
The sneaky try-to-make-it-sound-like-the-House-GOP-wants-immigration-reform question is just like a lousy fundraising mailer I got from the RNC a few weeks ago. The HouseGOP does not want immigration reform. It treated the senate bill like a dead animal. Then it killed it for a year.
Mr. Cunningham seemed to agree that the wording of that question was, at best, confusing. I said that they should just ask if we support a path to citizenship for illegals, since that’s the real issue here. As the majority of Republicans in America want this – and 2/3 of Republicans favor the current senate bill that just passed – they should just ask us a straightforward question.
I have other complaints about the form:
– 1-10 is just annoying to users. It should either be high or low or low-medium-high.
– The ratings are too close to everything so it isn’t clear sometimes what goes with what. Also, the ratings drop down shouldn’t be that long.
– Why are you asking if I support the disabled? What does that mean? Is is possible that the party platform will say that “no, we don’t support the disabled”? The question is an embarrassment because it has no context (e.g. a proposed law).
– What does it mean to support the existence of the pledge of allegiance? Does anyone not support it existing? And what do the ratings mean in that context?
Other complaints have been technical in nature. Ed Lyons, a commenter at Red Mass Group, opined, “Your form is broken. It won’t accept 1 values for priority for no reason. It doesn’t let me choose MA but makes me type it. Then it makes me choose from a long list of countries? …Why would you release a broken, poorly-designed form on the 450,000 Republicans in this state? After two months lacerating President Obama for a broken website nobody thought to actually try the form? (If it didn’t accept any of the default values of any question, that means not one person tested it.) I already know two people who gave up and didn’t submit.”
Brock Cordeiro, regional chair for the Massachusetts Republican State Committee, complained that he “had to use Netscape and not Chrome or IE” and that “I tried to rate something, and instead of what I listed it seemed to slip back to 1. In that case, I got the error message about being unable to list it as 1, and I rated what I had wanted in the first place. Perhaps the form should’ve started at 0, and accepted 0-10. 🙂 ”
“Professional” is not the term inspired by this MassGOP survey. “Crackpot”, more like.
I once went to their web site to see if the had a link to a web site for the Republican Town Committee for Milford, I had no idea if they had a web site so I figured the state party would point me there if they did have one. There was a link for Milford on the page, but when I clicked it, I got the Republican Town Committee web site for Milford, CONNECTICUT! Last I checked, it was still linking to the wrong site…
My results are here:
http://red.ma.altercate.net/2013/10/31/massgop-com-republican-town-city-committees/
is that anyone can take it. Just head on over to the link in Laurel’s post and check it out! 🙂