How well President Obama did with the State of the Union Address probably depends on your personal politics.
If you like the idea of “free” things subsidized by others and more government intervention in people’s live, you probably liked what you heard. If you rather have less government involvement in your life and your wallet, you probably didn’t care too much for it. But MSNBC viewers were united in their love for it, across the political spectrum.
MSNBC ran a “Pulse” poll on the bottom of the screen during the State of the Union. Viewers could log in to their website and give real-time feedback of their reaction to the president’s words as he delivered them. The sample was self-identified, so people could choose if they were “Democrat, Republican, or Independent.”
There was no way to prove people identified themselves accurately, but watching the ticker, which was live on the screen throughout the speech, gives the impression that perhaps participants were less than honest in their party ID.
Throughout the president’s speech, Democrats routinely hovered over 90 percent, self-described “Independents” mostly stayed above 85 percent and Republicans rarely dipped below 80 percent, sometimes spiking in the mid-90s.
