The same folks that gave us a misleading poll about Terri Schiavo are now reporting the results of a poll that asks, “Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for Republicans to confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees?” Not surprisingly, given the wording of the poll, a huge majority of respondents said they oppose the Republicans.

As Jim Geraghty at TKS notes, the result might be quite different if the respondents were asked, “Do you support a minority of Democrats preventing Bush’s judicial nominees from being voted on, when a majority of senators have indicated their support for those nominees?”

For historical context, the pollster should also have mentioned that no judicial nominee has been successfully* filibustered since September 1968.

But that kind of fairness in polling is simply asking too much.

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Others blogging…

Ankle Biting Pundits

Erick at RedState

Daly Thoughts…tk. A snippet:

I am not cynical enough to suspect that the sample was manipulated to under-represent conservatives. I suspect something else is at play here.

John Hinderaker at Power Line:

[T]he poll contains bad news for Republicans across a broad range of issues, including Social Security. Which raises, as always, the question of the poll’s internals. Sure enough: they over-sampled Democrats. If you look at page 16 of the poll data, which can be downloaded from the Post’s article, it discloses that 35% of the poll’s respondents were Democrats, while only 28% were Republicans. Given that slightly more self-identified Republicans than Democrats voted in last November’s election, this represents an egregious, seven-point over-sampling of Democrats. No wonder the poll data are bad for Republicans.

Ramesh Ponnuru, Tim Graham

*”successfully” added at 11:10 pm eastern.

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