As much as a foundational understanding of statistics would go a long way towards making the average citizen substantially better-informed, stuff like this sometimes makes my shoulders sag in despair. Even if you know the basics, the corrections, weighting, and methodologies used to try and tease the/a ‘truth’ out of a sample are often so arcane that it feels as though you know nothing at all, and are right back to square zero: do I trust these results at all, or no?

What a mess. I really don’t want to believe that a slim majority of Americans want us to go the Nixon route, but it’s hard to tell where my suspicion of the methods used begins to blend into bias…