should be a front page diary.  Whatever the outcome this is a serious political action with potentially significant ramifications for the Dems.  You are curiously silent.....

OK, this is interesting. While Republicans feel safer than Democrats, and while they rate the government's efforts to protect the country since 9-11 much higher than Democrats, they are still more worried about a terrorist attack occurring in America over the next year. Someone is going to have to explain that one to me. If you feel safer, and think the government is doing a good job protecting you, should you be less worried about a terrorist attack (or vice versa?).

You may want to look at that one again (I had to look a second time myself). The Repubs are skewing lower on the worry scale than the Dems. Are you reading the results backwards?

Kevin Drum remarked on this a little while ago.  He noted a poll where one of the questions was whether you had voted in the last election--and 91 percent answered yes. This was regarding an election in which there was 70 percent turnout.

Taking Q9 as an example, if a democrat were in office, republicans would indicate much more concern about bin Laden's status.  

People know what polls are used for, and try to influence them in their answers.  That's what makes polling analysis an art. What a goodly fraction of these republicans are really saying is "I support the President." over and over again.

Very interesting results.  

This just underlines that Rove really knows what he's doing.  The bottom line is that terrorism is fundamentally really more of a Dem issue - terrorists tend to target large cities which are disproportionately Democrat (NY twice, DC, LA, etc..).  Kansas is in fact quite safe!  Making natl security the top issue not only feeds raw meat to the base ideologically, but also speaks directly to the tangible needs of the Dem base.

Dems cannot hide from the natl security issue - it's literally life or death for their constituents!  Any Dem running for office (in '06 or '08) needs to take the fight to the Repubs & make the case that the current policies have made us LESS SAFE and that the dems do have an alternative plan and that finding Bin Laden would be the # 1 priority of the Democrats.

This is what makes the current situation so frustrating for most urban liberals (esp. NYers) - no one hates Bin Laden more than us, but we have to watch Bush botch the struggle against terrorism and then be chastised as a fifth column by TV windbags.  It's completely nuts.

I'm still trying to parse the question "do you feel safer since 9/11."  When I first read the question, I interpreted it to mean "safer than I felt before 9/11" and then I realized that it probably means "safer than I felt on the day of 9/11."  So with the latter reading in mind, I'm trying to imagine the circumstances where anyone regardless of party would actually feel less safe now than on that day, when we were all imagining bombs blowing up in shopping malls and subways and sports arenas.  Yet 34% of Democrats apparently do feel less safe and secure now, even though a larger percentage of them are city-dwellers.

Am I the only person who is having trouble with this question?  Is it because of my narrow interpretation of "safe and secure" as having to do with terror attacks?  Or is it because I live in a mid-sized southern city and not in a giant coastal one?  Someone help me out please!

And by the way, on 9/11 I was living about 30 miles outside a giant east-coast city and wasn't particularly afraid for my own immediate safety...

So in this question, immediately following the one noted above, respondents rated their own feelings of safety and security since that time, "where 1 means you feel a lot safer and more secure now and 5 means you feel a lot less safe and secure now". Thus, measuring personal safety in the period since the attack is what the question does.

Hope that clears it up for you. Thanks for asking.

In the response to Q6, the numbers in the Dem column sum up to less than 90%.  What's up with that?  Perhaps a typo in the 'Fair' category?  (It seems unlikely that the weighted average of 20.1, 14.7 and 32.1 would be as high as 29.2 - you'd have to have considerably more than 90% of the population in the third category for that to have a hope of being true.)

It's not your average poll question. Exactly! :)

Yes, this is what I wanted. Usually the big pollsters ask the same darn questions over and over. Though this is good in tracking the shifts in opinion it leaves much to be desired when it comes to the overall picture.

Thanks guy for all your work. I am so enjoying this.

I still say the Dems best commercial is the one featuring Bush saying about bin Laden "Dead or Alive", followed by his "i'm not really concerned about bin Laden", followed by a montage of terrorist attacks following his "I'm not concerned" remarks....

Rove had made it clear that he wants "National Security" to be the issue, and that he plans on casting dems as "weak" on National Security...

these numbers show that Dems need to, and can, solidify the idea that the White House is not showing the necessary leadership on National Security....

What do these answers tell us?  Dems & Reps both trust their team and don't trust the other, independents are in between?  Dems think the Reps ought to get the rap for not capturing Osama as Bushie said they would, while Reps would like this issue to go away?

Where is the surprise in any of this?

Why is it that the sum of the Democrats' percentages in Q6 is only 80%? Did a fifth of Democrats refuse to answer the question?

All the other columns sum to 100% (or close enough). Is this odd?

Pretty much confirms for me something most of us have known for some time now. A significant number of Republicans are inherent cowards. :)

Thanks for clearing that up.

(For those who think I am wrong, fine. :) Just think back to your school days and the school bully. The bully was always the loudest and the most angry, and even violent. But when seriously confronted, they ran. Just like Republicans). How many Republicans in the Administration actually served in an armed conflict? Compared to Democrats? There is a reason the Republicans are called Chickenhawks, and it goes all the way down the line.

Hey, not seeing any coverage of the poll in more traditional media settings (or whatever we call it).  When that comes in, hope you post the links.

A more constructive way of putting it...

A lot of Republicans are suffering from cognitive dissonance.

Is there a central page where all the posts on the Polling Project are gathered?

If not, I would like to suggest one.

If so, I would suggest a prominent link on the main page.

This is a big deal and should be easy to find all in one place, and easy to direct people to.

You mention "the margin of error on these sub-samples is pretty large" but do not provide the margins of error. That would be useful knowledge and highly relevant for interpreting the data.

You could also clarify the value of these results by providing the n, the subset of N respondents (N = total sample size) for each cell. This is related to the issue above and to another comment in your post, that other polls often don't present such crosstabs. One reason they don't is that margins of error quickly become huge in the cells, and thus few statisticians feel quite comfortable attributing meaning to the numbers. The smaller the number of respondents in any given cell, the more likely that margins of error are swamping any apparent variation across sample subsets. (and vice versa)