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No. 57% of Republicans can easily detect a question that was designed as subterfuge to detect opinions about a president whom they support politically; they answered the real question instead of the fake one, which is why this kind of polling is diagnostically useless. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1297547642961002497
Opinion polling has been infected by MBTI-style hokum in which questions about one thing are repeatedly asked in order to ferret out information about something else, all of it then overlaid onto a schematic typology dreamed up by kooks.
But like any Junior Executive In Training who gets asked to take a Meyers Briggs during the second round of interviews, halfway intelligent people know exactly how to answer in order to exhibit precisely the type they want to exhibit.
So a semi-astute conservative who hears the question "Is 170K deaths acceptable" understands immediately and intuitively that the REAL question is: do you still support the gross president even though he's fucked up so badly?
It's both tricky and insulting, and so you say that you support the president, which this binary question has set up in such a way as to say you think 170K deaths is fine.
Now maybe you do think it's fine, and maybe you don't, but that's not really the question you're answering, and it's not a useful measure of attitudes except insofar as it again tells us what we *already know* - that there is a Trumpist base of perhaps 1/4 of the adult population
And before you put on your horrified face that this in some ways demonstrates the cruelty inherent to that 25%, don't forget that George Bush killed a million people, although lucky you, they were foreigners, and you forgave him because he was nice to Michelle.
People--most people, across ideologies--will accept a shocking number of bodies *in the abstract* on the basis of their political affinities. Trying to find the exact straw that's going to break the camel's back is not helpful. Instead, ask *why* people support what they do.
But those are qualitative questions and are harder to hide behind the pseudoscientific precision of margins of error and percentages.
