However, we don't expect the next election to be decided on these five issues. Just because a person might be willing to cross parties in the next election does not necessarily say that they will subscribe to, or in any way accept the rest of the party platform.

I think in the last election we saw the alternatives to be so distasteful that Bush was elected, even though not the ideal candidate. Still, according to the exit polls in 2004, John Kerry is our President.

Second, you can blame Clinton all you want but these guys have been in charge for 6 years now. In addition, according to the right wing mantra, "9/11 changed everything!" Well, if I believe that, it means that our government should have been doing everything humanly possible to protect us and improve security. Guess what? It's not true. Nothing's changed! Nada, zero, zip! By all accounts, it's worse.

These guys are all the same(left and right). They don't care about me or you. They only care about money and power. Stop acting like any of them are highly moral, upstanding public servants. They are ALL crooks and liars. The problem I have now is that the current majority party is using the cloak of security and fear to basically get away with everything they've wanted for years.

Just think for a second about what's been going on. Not a single veto! Not one! This hasn't happened since John Adams. The President comes out and says he doesn't need to follow laws. Congress just sits on its hands. We are sinking into unparalleled debt and foreign investment. There is no accountability, no responsibility, nothing. Things like this scare me. I wish I could have your rosy view of the future but, to me it look pretty dim.

I agree that polls aren't very useful in deciding public policy or answering most questions of fact. Whether there is going to be a civil war in Iraq is something that not even geniune experts know; polling on that is silly.

Polling is useful, however, for gauging the public mood. What all the polls tell us is that the Republicans are in trouble at the moment. They don't tell us anything about what will happen between now and November, of course, but November is getting pretty doggone close.

I'm curious about the question wording as well, although Bolger and Greenberg agreed upon it. My guess is that it has to do with solving specific problems rather than generic issues.

Research for use in marketing perhaps has some value. Polls about national policy are not an indication of any hard facts. There is often a broad gap between opinion and fact, and the masses are often uninformed. I thought you recently pointed out that 80% of Americans believing there was civil war in Iraq was irrelevant? We don't run this country by polls because we trust our elected representatives to make decisions for us.

You can't give any credence to the fact the the questions are poorly worded? From the question, this is supposed to be a list of issues, right? It appears to be more of a list of complaints: 'lack of attention', 'outsourcing' and 'violence (i.e. civil war)'. All very leading concepts that point to complaints about this administration specifically.

I would think much simpler terms would have yielded different results. i.e. Immigration, Homeland Security, Global Economic Competition, and so on.

You should also note that 'polls' have determined THE most significant problem facing the U.S. to be Iran.

I would note that Osama declared war on the U.S halfway through Clinton's watch and that 9/11 was five years later. And the current problems with port security were there when Clinton was in office, too. Bush deserves blame for not having done more but it's not like things were going swimmingly before; the cracks just hadn't manifested in an explosion yet.

This is one ugly poll for Republicans. I actually predicted before that the GOP use of national security of a political "life-line" to pull them out of any electoral problems was going to backfire. Here's what I said before: ...Republicans......

POS and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner are, respectively, the best Republican and Democratic polling firms in the country. The parties and their leading candidates for national and statewide office pay them millions to commission surveys because their results are trustworthy.

And your alternate questions make no sense. The survey is asking which party likely voters trust more to handle those issues, not what the public's view of those issues is.

Why not just say:

Are you for homeland security?
Do you want to outsource jobs?
Do you support religious violence?
A nuclear Iran?

Yet another crappy, irresponsible poll that means nothing.