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Notes -
Sorry could you help me understand what you are implying at the end with the link? I couldn’t even find 12B in the doc
Sorry, Q13 Split B, on page 6. I'd confused the numbering system since Split B would not have been asked Q12.
Half of the response group (Split A) were asked
They gave answers in 30ish categories, with 9% giving some category outside of those answers, and 3% giving no answer. The other half were asked :
They gave answers in only 15 categories, with 7% other, and 12% no answer. For individual answers, there are wide spreads -- 20% of split B thought abortion so important that they mostly strongly felt and could not vote for a politician that disagreed with them, while only 8% said it was the single most important question. In Split B, the closest I can find is the 1% that were categorized as "Inflation".
Some variation from one split to the next isn't unusual -- it's hard to get a perfectly random sample -- but the gap here is vast, and not especially coherent. Some of this probably the different question wording, especially the dropped importance of the economy-focused answers for Split B. But another portion probably reflects merged or split answers, especially for things like "Freedom and Rights", "Foreign Policy (general)".
And that's the open-ended question, where the poll subject had the most control over matters. If the WSJ article is really coming down from the latter questions that are thumbs-up or thumbs-down on specific matters (which they almost certainly must be, given the numbers the WSJ infographic uses), this gets even uglier. There's a lot of questions, even ones fairly high on Q12/Q13, that weren't investigated in later question at all.
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