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...