After taking care of some major reports and briefings last week, it's nice to be back in the saddle on the MyDD Poll. Nicer still that I don't have a Coupla Tons O' Stress weighing on me at the same time. My compliments to Chris for doing an excellent job giving you all an overview of the basic data. His compendium, with links to his previous posts, can be found here.

My contribution involves deep analysis of the data and the strategic implications of the findings. My first post on this, found here discussed very, very important stark data patterns in some of the early questions. Demographic groups including Republicans, voters in the South, fundamentalist/evangelicals, affluent voters and men show the same response patterns across several questions, `buying into' the overall extremist meme hook, line and sinker. Thus, they say the country is headed in the right direction, Bush job approval is high among them and good jobs with decent wages are locally available.

Key progressive voter groups consistently link together on questions, too, including Democrats, voters in the Northeast and West Coast, those less affluent, women, minority voters and those religiously liberal. Their take on virtually all issues tested is almost polar opposite of the extremists.

These patterns crop up across virtually all questions in the poll, which leads to the conclusion we've got a country divided along fault lines the size of the Grand Canyon on a plethora of issues. This is not a new finding, but it's importance really increases when we recognize we have it quantified in our data. That means we can explore it, test it, learn about it, at a much deeper level than others who simply report it's existence. And that's precisely what we'll do over the course of the next week or two: dive deep in order to learn the outlines of a winning political campaign strategy. Let's hop to it after the jump...

There's more...

The Homeland Security Advisory System, those famous color-coded threat bars, were developed by the government after 9/11 to tell us how worried, concerned, fearful, etc. we should be regarding the threat of a terrorist attack.

It's a one-way system. There's no systematic nor comprehensive feedback on the issue from the public. Further, it's going on five years now since 9/11 and no ongoing public poll, to my knowledge, has provided an easy-to-understand summary of how Americans perceive the threat of terrorist attack. Sure, these polls ask questions on occasion, but there's no integrated system, or index measure, that's been developed and tracked regularly over time.

Major polls have just such indexes for consumerism/economic behavior. Good ones, too. Witness the plethora  available at the Polling Report website. Funny how consumerism trumps terrorism as an issue deemed worthy of significant polling resources and measurement efforts, eh? Shocking, I say.

In our view, it's time voters are able to tell elected officials, business and community leaders how worried, concerned, fearful, etc. they should be regarding public perceptions of a terrorist attack. Let's complete the feedback loop. The MyDD Poll, again breaking new ground, designed just such a assessment into this poll: the Terrorism Threat Index. It's a basic assessment in this poll due to funding limitations and time constraints with a relatively short interview. We couldn't ask a whole series of questions about it. However, this post shows how the concept works, providing clear summary information through only five questions. The Index easily can and should be expanded with more measures and developed into a robust summary of  voter perceptions of threat of the terrorist attack. Here's how it works...

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