Tom Maguire has a new post up about polls and global warming, comparing a Washington Post poll with a Pew Research version to suggest a lukewarm public concern for the carbon problem. He points out how the polls have remained relatively consistent for several years.
That tripped a light bulb (incandescent). Before the election I suggested that Bush must have won the GWoT because polls showed it ranked in the single digits in public importance. That of course is absurd--Bush did not win the GWoT--but the point was to illustrate how either 1) the media downplayed the terrorism question to favor Obama or 2) the public has become spoiled due to Bush's success and therefore has forgotten about terrorism, which means we haven't been attacked.
Rummaging back to the post in question and perusing through the numbers it would seem that Gallup, Pew and other more independent polling groups had terrorism ranking similar to what Maguire's post showed at that time, while the Networks and NY Times put terrorism's importance much lower, many times in the single digits. The public voted accordingly.
Proving the numbers were cooked to favor Democrats is beyond my pay grade (stats were never my favorite subject anyway) but maybe one day somebody with knowledge of stats and polling will explain this.
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