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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (170375)	6/2/2003 7:45:45 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1583556

The phrasing of a poll effects the results. If you asked "What if hundreds of Americans died?" you focus peoples minds on deaths and get a bigger reduction in the poll then the same number of casualties in the actual war would cause. People don't usually respond to what if's in polls logically. When you say "what if it takes hundreds of thousands of troops?", then it makes people think that it will be a huge effort, taking more soldiers then expected. If the poll had asked "Do you support using force to remove the brutal aggressive dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and prevent Iraq from being a danger to America's oil supply?" or "Do you support freeing the people of Iraq and eliminating Saddam's threat to the Persian Gulf nations?" then you would have had even larger majorities in support then the actual polls showed, even though the questions contain no new information or justification. There is no logical reason to have larger majorities to those questions but almost certainly that is what you would get. The way to get the least distortion is to leave off all the what ifs and just ask people if they support a military effort to get rid of Saddam. I believe any poll in the US asking that question showed majority support for the war. Tim