The poll make sense. What the public got were news stories about how the stimulus money was going to go to Wall Street and Banks, and to American auto companies. In the months since, unemployment is still scary enough that it doesn't feel all that much better. Not to mention the state governments were not really given the amount of money they'd need to avoid massive cuts and those cuts are coming now. The media didn't really spend much time discussing alternatives for how stimulus money might be directed or how a second stimulus might be structured (compared to discussions of the death of Michael Jackson, about which almost every American is a certified expert). In particular, Republicans are plugged into FOX News and shrill propagandists like Amity Shlaes who feel free to completely rewrite economic history along the lines of how Alex Cockburn described Ronald Reagan's "memory" of World War II: "when the people of the Free World - American, British,
French and German - fought shoulder to shoulder against Soviet totalitarianism"