Polls That I Can’t Take Seriously…

I’d like to see how this question was worded: [UPDATE: I had misread the link, and thought that wording was only available to premium subscribers. Make the numbers even more wacky; totally eliminating North Korea’s ability to launch missiles would require full scale war.]

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of U.S. voters nationwide favor a military response to eliminate North Korea’s missile launching capability. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that just 15% of voters oppose a military response while 28% are not sure.

What exactly does “military response” mean? But here is the real kicker:

Overall, 75% of voters say they’ve been closely following news stories about the possible launch. That figure includes 40% who’ve followed the news Very Closely.

Ahem. If you believe that 75% of the registered voters in the United States were closely following the North Korean missile launch on Friday, then I have a tea party to sell you.

When you have a poll that suggests that 40% of registered voters have been following a national security event “very closely,” and then you note that the poll was taken before the missile launch even occurred, you should know that there’s a problem somewhere…

This reveals how useless polling on obscure issues can be. Rasmussen would have us believe that more people want us to go to war with North Korea than favor the current wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan. This is farcically stupid; although it appears that Newt Gingrich came out in favor of a preventive strike on North Korea, it’s a position that’s held by approximately zero policymakers on either side of the aisle. That said, I’d love to see the Republicans try to run in 2010 on a platform of starting a third unpopular war…