Iraq dominated the headlines throughout the fall of 2002 and into the winter of 2003. Public opinion on the wisdom of war, however, stabilized relatively early and slightly in favor of war. Gallup found that from August 2002 through early March 2003 the share of Americans favoring war hovered in a relatively narrow range between a low of 52 percent and a high of 59 percent. By contrast, the share of the public opposed to war fluctuated between 35 percent and 43 percent.

Looks like Americans are even more happy with murdering people if its done by a puppet.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/rally-round-the-flag-opinion-in-the-united-states-before-and-after-the-iraq-war/

  • lemmyseizethemeans
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Ok cool. 1000 people who will answer a text message from unknown. Would you? Again, I know literally zero people who support Israel in this conflict. Got friends up and down the age spectrum, in and outside of the states.

    So my poll says 100% of everyone I know wants this shit to end. Facebook, Twitter, insta, all on the same page here.

    Somehow American polls always seem to be, ahem, skewed.

    Look at those 538 predictions based on ‘polling data’ on the last several elections.

    • zed_proclaimer [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 year ago

      So my poll says 100% of everyone I know wants this shit to end. Facebook, Twitter, insta, all on the same page here.

      This is not how statistics works

          • Nagarjuna [he/him]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            1 year ago

            A random sample of mobile phone users isn’t a random sample, because you’re only going to get the people who answer texts from strangers.

            It’s called “non-response bias” and it’s a huge part of the reason political polling doesn’t work. It’s strong enough to render almost any sample from a phone survey non-representative.

            • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Yeah I understand that there’s a difference between the sampled population and the actual population of interest, but you can’t discount the results of on account of that unless you can meaningfully show a non-zero covariance between the response variable and likelihood of non-response.

              By all means it’s a caveat but it doesn’t make these results entirely non-informative.

              In any case I cited iid conditions to explain why asking all their friends is certain to produce a useless estimate of the population proportion.