All polls try to take complex social issues and squeeze them into a simple yes/no answer. It's not the methodology of selecting the sample or the questions that needs to be questioned, but, rather, whether polls actually provide any useful information.
Is the country headed in the right/wrong direction, for example. What is a person supposed to answer if they think foreign policy is a disaster, but domestic policy is great, or vice versa? How about if they like the farm policy, but hate the import policy?
Is Bush doing a good job? Same thing, one may like his religious pandering, but dislike his tax breaks. How are they to answer?
I hope you have fun with your adventures into sociology, but I doubt anything useful will come of this. Take a look at PIPA for more meaningful (although still flawed) ways to gather data.
Finally, it is well known that when asked for their opinions people will respond even when they have no idea of the issues involved. Just yesterday there was data released showing that about half the population doesn't even know which party controls congress.
Sorry to be so negative, but only detailed interviews which get past people's glib answers can reveal what their positions really are.
Very astute comment, but IMO doesn't go far enough. What if one thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction because of pork-barrel politics, politicization of Supreme Court nominations, and lack of will to protect the country from further terrorist attacks? According to the interpretation presented here, and common elsewhere, a person who answers "wrong track" for those reasons is counted as "unfavorable" with respect to Bush. Most of those positions could be either bipartisan or blaming one party more than the other, and certainly the third would be less likely to come from a person who would prefer to see Ted Kennedy in charge.
While this poll may be in the mainstream in its choice of interpretive framework, it is precisely the use of the data to attempt to shape public opinion that leads over time to invalid data. Validity in this context means measuring what you intend to measure. When the data is collected in this fashion and overinterpreted, self-aware respondents will begin to answers pollsters strategically: They will not provide their true opinion if they know their response will be used to argue that "people" have some other opinion. They will answer in terms of the way they expect the data to be interpreted. Accurate measurement becomes impossible.
There was a heyday of powerful predictiveness in US opinion polls, but that day I believe may be past.
