As RTID rides off into the sunset -- er, fog bank -- exit poll shows interesting twists

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As RTID rides off into the sunset -- er, fog bank -- exit poll shows interesting twists

Exit polling was released this morning by the Sierra Club, which broke from most green groups to oppose the giant three-county roads-and-transit tax that went down in flames this week. Some details:

Sound Transit light rail cars are rarin' to go
P-I photo/Joshua Trujillo

Nearly half the "no" voters said they were most opposed to the expensive extension of light rail to Tacoma.

However, one out of five thumbs-downers said their motivation was global warming, meaning they opposed the roads portion. Since the vote was about 44 percent yes and 56 percent no, that shows that the greens were a decisive factor, even when they were split. It shows that the Sierra Club is actually able to pull some votes.

This is key -- 52 percent said they would have voted in favor of the package if it were mass transit only, without all those stinkin' roads. One in four of those folks -- so 12 to 13 percent of the voters -- voted no. Their biggest reason -- representing 6 percent of the voters overall, or just about enough to swing the election -- was "environmental impacts like global warming."

The hard-fought battle over the Cross-Base Highway that would wipe out extremely rare habitat in southern Pierce County concerned only 4 percent of the voters. These would be the folks who voted "no" because they want the highway built.* In a closer race that could have made a difference, but this baby was goin' down anyway. (You could pretty much feel that, e.g. folks were starting to write "what's-next" editorials even before the vote.)
* (Update/correction: Dateline Earth reader Steve E. points out that we got this wrong -- the Cross Base Highway funding, which was taken out of the measure at one point, actually found its way back in. So, this 4 percent would presumably be folks who are against the highway -- still not enough to swing the election, though.)

Forty-five percent of the anti- voters were against higher taxes. No surprise there. The feature of the taxes voters liked least was their five-decade span; 35 percent of the voters cited that as their top concern about taxes. Next: Sales tax increase, 21 percent; car tab increase, 19 percent; regressive nature of the taxes, 14 percent. The remainder had some other objection.

Here is the Sierra Club Cascade Chapter's home page. Maybe they will post something about these exit polls later, although nothing's up so far. (And it appears the last post was Oct. 1. Hmmm... guess they've been kinda busy.)

My favorite feature of their home page? The online poll question: Do you vote in online polls? You gotta love greens with a sense of humor.

P.S. I'm a little short on time, so I did not read the poll questions. Those can have an impact on how voters answered. The margin of error, btw, was 1.4 percent. (Like most polls nowadays, they didn't bother to give us the confidence interval; i.e., if you took the poll over and over again, how many times would the margin of error actually *be* within 1.4 percentage points. Polls are just a little less exact than many of us think of them being.)

Posted by at November 8, 2007 11:32 a.m.
Categories: Climate change, Consumers and the environment, Global warming

Comments

#65010

Posted by Steve E. at 11/9/07 9:21 p.m.

The hard-fought battle over the Cross-Base Highway that would wipe out extremely rare habitat in southern Pierce County concerned only 4 percent of the voters. These would be the folks who voted "no" because they want the highway built.
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Robert, is this a typo? Voting for prop 1 would have cut funding loose for the initial design of the Cross-Base.

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