ACCCE's '72% of Opinion Leaders' Claim is Manipulative Bunk

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) has been running an online advertisement at the Washington Post, The Hill and other web sites which makes the following claim: 72% of opinion leaders support coal electricity.

A closer look at this claim provides yet another example of how the coal and electricity industries that created ACCCE are manipulating Americans in their fight to keep polluting for free.

If you click on the "America's Power" advertisement, you're taken to this page, where the ACCCE claims "it’s easy to see why 72 percent of American opinion leaders support the use of coal." On this page are four links that all go to the same press release describing the ACCCE study that produced this 72% number.

The Election Day 2008 press release makes a number of questionable claims. I requested a copy of the survey's methodology last week from ACCCE and received no response. One of the hired pollsters involved was more forthcoming with information, though not a copy of the methodology.

The claims all rest on the survey's definition, provided at the bottom of the press release, of "opinion leaders," aka "opinion elites."

These are defined as follows:

The poll interviewed 600 opinion elites nationwide. Elites are defined as adults with $80,000 or more in household income and a four-year college degree or more and a professional or managerial job title or a business owner and a high degree of involvement in politics and policy matters.

So how many people is that really?

According to the Census Bureau economic data, there were 116.8 million households in the U.S. in 2007 (the latest year for which there's complete data), of which only 34.1 million meet the income requirement described for an "opinion elite" above. That's just 29% of all households.

According to the Census Bureau educational attainment data, there are approximately 60.5 million people in the U.S. with at least a four-year college degree. That's just under 28% of the estimated population of the U.S. in 2007 that was at least 18 years old.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if we take all occupations in management, legal, computers and mathematics, architecture and engineering, healthcare providers and technicians, and business and finance as individuals who might qualify as "opinion elites" by profession, that's a total of approximately 26.1 million people out of a total of approximately 253 million people employed in 2007. That's only about 10% of the workforce.

Finally, we'll have to make an educated guess about how someone was defined as having "a high degree of involvement in politics and policy matters."It's probably fair to say that the nation's 65,000 legislators and 15,000 lobbyists in 2007 qualified, but they are certainly not alone (and they're already counted in the workforce numbers just described). Pollster Thomas Riehle of RT Strategies, one of the two groups that produced this study for the ACCCE, says the 600 participants were selected from a group regularly used by his company. He says they represent about 7% of the population.

As you can see, there's a significant problem with this definition – it applies to such a small number of individuals in the U.S. that it's impossible to generalize the results.

So much for the available survey methodology notes – on to the survey's results.