NYC on the war

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Thu Mar 6 18:09:19 PST 2003


Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> That's a surprising stat, and would be disturbing if true and
> generalizable. New Yorkers in this sample are against war w/out a
> resolution by 80/20, but active dissent only outweighs active support by 9
> to 7? That would mean the other side is getting a phenomenal 35% of its
> people active while we're only activating 11 1/4%. At these rates, if the
> country was divided 50/50, they'd beat us by 3 to 1 in terms of visible
> support.
>

How is "active" defined. Probably the pro-war activism is confined to writing letters. If that is the case, then (a) the figures seem reasonable and (b) are not disturbing. One activist for every 9 who are sympathetic is a tremendous figure. One would expect something like 2 to 5 per cent or even less.

Carrol


> Could that possibly be true, or is it just a spurious artifact?
>
> Michael



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