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">https://twitter.com/atrupar/s...
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& #39;s fucked up so badly?
It& #39;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& #39;s fine, and maybe you don& #39;t, but that& #39;s not really the question you& #39;re answering, and it& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s going to break the camel& #39;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.