Crow, crow

Last week I posted about My newspaper's "People Poll," an informal call-in poll that runs every Friday on the editorial page. The editors had framed one asking, multiple choice style, what was the most important issue in the upcoming presidential election. And, though it mentioned "foreign policy," it made no reference to the War on Terrorism. I pointed this out to them.

I just went back tonight to check the results, out of curiosity. And lo and behold, they took my suggestion and changed the "foreign policy" item to "war on terrorism."

And "war on terrorism" won. With six items to choose from, more than a third of the callers picked that as the most important issue.

Now this is a totally unscientific poll, as I pointed out. But it's an interesting result: this is a very conservative, Republican corner of Pennsylvania. If three out of every four Republicans here were kidnapped by aliens on the eve of the next election, the Republican still would win.

But we're the "Democratic" paper in this community. Our readers are more likely to be weighted toward the Independent and Democratic voters than our community as a whole.

Here are the results (and I see that I misstated the choices somewhat, in my earlier post, quoting them from memory):

war on terrorism 37.5%
economic policy 28.2%
health care 21.5%
abortion 5.8%
environmental policy 4.4%
party affiliation 2.6%