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...

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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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Yesterday was an extremely hectic and exhausting day, for obvious reasons. But I'm very pleased to see all the positive comments, thoughtful questions and strong interest in the project, data and results. Thanks, there's much more to come, so stay tuned.

A very quick point. I'm fairly new to writing in html and posting extensively, although I've been doing research for decades. I will do the best I can in posting, particularly in doing crosstab tables, but just know I'm not a pro at this yet. I'm learning and still working on my posting style, which is more conversational, like we're talking face to face. We'll see how it goes. Thanks for your patience.

I've gotten the crosstabs for all questions run out, so I'll be following Chris' release of new data and questions with my detailed analyses of those questions. Sort of a big picture and then detail thing. And the crosstabs I show may vary a bit depending on which ones are showing important findings on any given question. I'll always keep region and party shown, but others might vary. So the detail starts now...

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Well, not really, but this report from USCountVotes has gotten surprisingly little attention, even in the left blogosphere where you would think it'd be most warmly received.

In this report, USCountVotes analyzes the claim that the discrepancy between the 2004 Presidential vote and the exit polls was caused by Bush voters' greater reluctance to be interviewed by exit pollsters. That claim is found severely wanting. Instead, the evidence suggests the worst discrepancies were in GOP strongholds, which is consistent with (but doesn't prove) the hypothesis of widespread GOP tampering in areas they control. It would also be consistent with the observation that GOP-leaning demographic groups, like the fundies, appeared to swing even more toward the GOP in 2004 than in 2000.

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