We are truly a mathematically illiterate nation. Here’s an example of a respected blogger and a national polling outfit both managing to make themselves look pretty silly (the latter much more than the former).

Greg Sargent noted yesterday that a new Pew poll confirms an earlier Rasmussen poll that showed support for Republican leaders dropping sharply among self-identified Republicans:

One thing we’ve been chronicling here is the increasing disillusionment that Republicans are experiencing with their own party’s Congressional leadership, and a new poll today finds that approval for GOP leaders is dropping among Republicans with astonishing speed.

That’s the second poll with such a finding. The other day I flagged a Rasmussen poll finding that Republican leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are viewed favorably by only a minority of GOP voters.

Today a new Pew poll confirms that this isn’t an outlier. …

The approval rating of GOP leaders among Republicans has plummeted 12 points in a month, down from 55% in February to a minority of 43% now (emphasis in the original). That’s striking.

Not only that, but approval of GOP leaders overall has dropped to 28% overall — the lowest rating for GOP leaders in 12 years of Pew polling.

Actually, the Pew poll shows that, over the last month, support for Republican leaders has dropped at almost exactly the same rate among Republicans, Democrats and independents.

In each case, support dropped by approximately one-fifth. For Republicans, it dropped from 55% to 43%, for Democrats from 24% to 19%, and for independents from 32% to 26%.

Sargent evidently thinks the one-fifth drop from 55% to 43% is somehow more striking and meaningful than the one-fifth drop from 24% to 19% (presumably, because 12 is a larger number than 5). (He should probably sit at Nate Silver‘s feet for a week or so, and get some basic concepts cleared up.)

However, the real story here is that Republicans are getting disillusioned with the GOP leadership at exactly the same rate as everyone else.

The really depressing part is that Greg Sargent is only guilty of uncritical consumption of Pew’s own analysis:

Republicans, in particular (emphasis mine), have become less supportive of their party’s leaders in Congress: just 43% of Republicans approve of their job performance, down from 55% just a month ago.

For Pew to say this is much less defensible than for Greg Sargent to say it. As a respected polling outfit, Pew is supposed to understand numbers. For them to exhibit such mathematical/statistical illiteracy is way beyond astoundingly absurd.