Tip of the hat to Larry Bartels at The Monkey Cage blog who provides a brief reference to this story by Dylan Matthews, “Do 15% of Ohio Republicans think Romney killed Osama bin Laden? Probably not.”
Matthews asks:
Public Policy Polling has a new poll (pdf) out of Ohio showing Obama with his biggest lead since May. Given how hard it would be for Mitt Romney to win the White House without winning Ohio, that’s a big deal.
But a secondary finding in the poll has gotten a lot of attention. PPP asked voters who they thought deserved more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden: Obama or Romney. 63 percent said Obama, 31 percent weren’t sure, and 6 percent said Romney.
The results for Republican voters were even more astonishing. 38 percent said Obama, 47 percent weren’t sure, and 15 percent said Romney. What the heck is going on?
… and then goes on to give a nice summary of political science and social psychological work on the topic, including links back to articles by, guess who, Larry Bartels!
The timing for me is perfect, because we are reading Glynn, Herbst, Shapiro, and Keefe’s wonderful chapters (4-7) on different disciplinary conceptions of individual cognition and opinion change, followed by four chapters from Zaller (also linked from the Matthews’s story), then Converse’s seminal piece on mass belief systems (the foundation on which Zaller’s book was built).
Nice timing Dylan and Larry!
P.S. I hear through the rumor mill that there is a new edition of Glynn et al. being completed. I like that book and look forward to the third edition.