Transcript
ANDREW KOHUT: This year, we asked 96 questions, most of which are long-term trend questions on beliefs about foreign policy, and civil liberties, race, religion and social values, and the survey was 2,500 people in the middle of the summer. We have literally been analyzing that ever since, but we updated this survey with more recent trends on politics in Iraq in the second and third weeks of October.
We also dipped into the Pew Research Center database and pulled up 80,000 interviews over the past three years to look at trends in political—in party identification.
I am going to do something unusual today. I don't usually use PowerPoint slides or any slides. So what I am going to do is first tell you about the findings of the survey, and then I'm going to show you the findings of the survey because we have these long-term trends, and the graphics or the pictures really tell the story better than I could possibly do.
Our headline was, "The electorate is still 50-50, but more contentious than in 2000." Someone just called me, looked at the report, and he said you should change the headline to say, "50-50, but more so than in 2000."
And I think that's a pretty good description. Well, let me tell you about the findings first without looking at the pictures.
Our overall finding is that the national unity that we saw in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks have given way to intense political polarization and even anger. This is a very different political climate than it was even a year ago.
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