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November 24, 2007

Fun poll

I ran across this fun political poll a couple days ago. It's interactive in that you can go through and answer each of the questions and the next page shows you what the poll found and you can compare your answer to those of the respondants.

Of course polls can be parsed six ways to Sunday, depending on exactly who participated and how realistically they represent the larger population. But what I found most interesting about this poll was the variety in responses it got from those who did participate and the questions they were asked.

For example, this poll asks how often folks experience stress in their daily lives (Q8) and how often they feel like their lives are beyond their control (Q9). Question 12 asks whether the respondants feel that most people can be trusted or not and then follows that up with question 13 which asks whether they favor or oppose the Iraq War. I've taken a variety of polls and never have I been asked those kinds of questions.

Other fascinating questions were a series of morality questions about how respondants felt about drinking alcohol to excess, using Marijuana, gambling, downloading music files without paying for them, stealing cable TV access and about whether it's okay to use your neighbors wireless internet access, without paying for it of course. Those are followed by more conventional morality questions about gun laws, stem cell research and the like.

The last three questions are the most interesting to me because they are all very fundamental issues:

27: Do you favor or not favor having the federal government intervene to reduce the income differences between the richest and poorest Americans?

28: Do you favor or not favor canceling the tax cuts passed since 2001 for people who are wealthy?

29: Do you favor or not favor a government insurance plan that would cover all medical and hospital expenses for everyone?

Posted by Kevin at November 24, 2007 10:42 AM