When Pew released a poll earlier this week suggesting that there had been a significant shift in public opinion on abortion in recent months, Nate did a fine post exploring the long-term trends on the subject, and expressing considerable doubt that Pew had discovered anything of great moment. Well, today Gallup released another survey that seems to parallel the Pew findings, such as they are. And since (1) Nate’s on vacation, and (2) the two polls together are sure to get tons of play in conjunction with the anti-abortion protests at Notre Dame, not to mention Supreme Court speculation, I’ll do a brief post raising a few questions to help tide us over for a while, with particular emphasis on the key questions that pollsters rarely ask on this subject. First of all, the headline-grabbing finding by Gallup involves its efforts to split Americans into two camps self-identifying as either ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life.’ Aside from all the issues with how these two terms are perceived, this methodology also forces asunder and thus distorts the views of the vast ‘mushy middle’ on abortion policy, which Gallup itself measures at 53%, in a secondary question that divides respondents into three […]