Who Occupies? A Pollster Surveys the Protester

By Aaron Rutkoff

To judge by its most famous slogan, Occupy Wall Street sees itself as a movement made up of those in the bottom 99% of the income distribution. But what are the actual demographics of the committed protesters inside New York’s Zuccotti Park, the movement’s birthplace and most visible manifestation?

Douglas Schoen, a veteran Democratic Party pollster who has also worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sent a researcher from his polling firm down to Zuccotti Park last week to conduct what appears to be the very first professional survey of the protesters in New York. The face-to-face interviews with 198 people informed an essay by Schoen in The Journal’s opinion pages.

Putting aside Schoen’s analysis — the subhead on his piece pegs the protesters as “leftists out of step with most American voters,” if you’re curious — let’s focus instead on the raw data, which he was kind enough to publish on his personal website. The findings are quite surprising.

The protesters as a group are young, but Zuccotti Park is not nearly the youth-only movement depicted in the media. While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older. Only one-third of the crowd considers themselves Democrats — nearly the same portion who say they don’t identify with any party. (Zero respondents labeled themselves Republican.)

Schoen finds reason to be skeptical of the protesters’ professed motivation: the inequities of the U.S. economic system. “The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%),” he writes in his essay. But those numbers might not be the best way to assess the economic health of the protest group.

Schoen’s survey found that, in addition to the 15% of protesters who are jobless, another 18% consider themselves “part-time employed/underemployed” — for a combined total of 33% who are struggling in the labor market. That percentage is double the U.S. Labor Department’s broader measure of unemployment, which accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. As of September, this so-called “U-6″ measure rose to 16.5%, the highest rate this year.

The pollster has a curious reading of his data when describing Occupy Wall Street’s previous support for President Barack Obama. “An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008,” Schoen writes.

But according to the survey data, just 56% of protesters voted in 2008, and of those 74% voted for Obama. Crunching the numbers, it would appear that only 42% of the Zuccotti Park crowd has ever cast a presidential ballot for Obama.

The president looks likely to improve his standing with the protesters in 2012. The survey found 48% would vote for his re-election, even though a slim 51% majority of the protesters disapprove of his job performance.

Finally, the poll sheds some light on the protesters’ underlying policy agenda. The polling falls short of consensus, but some clear themes emerge.

When asked whether the U.S. should increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, more than three-fourths of the protesters said yes. More taxes on everyone? A smaller majority, 58%, said no.

And then there’s this interesting open-ended question from the poll: What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? Here are the responses (emphasis added):

• 35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
• 4% Radical redistribution of wealth
• 5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
• 7% Direct Democracy
• 9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
• 9% Promote a national conversation
• 11% Break the two-party duopoly
• 4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system
• 4% Single payer health care
• 4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately
• 8% Not sure

The two answers in bold seem sufficiently similar as to constitute a single answer — energizing populism on the left —  with 44% support.

So the survey tells us that the Zuccotti Park protesters are underemployed at twice the national rate, lukewarm to warm on Obama and broadly in favor of taxing the wealthy and encouraging a Tea Party-style populism on the left.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/10/19/who-is-occupying-wall-street-a-pollster-surveys-protester/