Wonder if they sampled Democrats over any other political group. This is certainly not the case as evidenced yesterday.
Well, the article says that:
65 percent of democrats supported gay marriage
51 percent of independents supported gay marriage
24 percent of republicans supported gay marriage
Then goes on to say "The poll showed 63 percent of Americans believe gay relations writ large should be legal..." I assume that means that the poll says there is 63 percent overall support for gay marriage.
To get 63 percent overall support from the earlier numbers reported, the sample would have to look something like 93% democrats, 3.5% independents, and 3.5% republicans (other combinations are possile with slightly different combinations of independents and republicans but they would all have this kind of skew).
If you use the earlier numbers with any reasonable distribution of party identification (say, 38% D, 27% I, 35% R), you would end up with 47% percent support for gay marriage - still a minority even after years of relentless media propaganda
I expect the reporter made some mistakes, but I also suspect that any poll from Pew has bias that stinks to high heaven. They don't call it "Pew" for nothing.
“Wonder if they sampled Democrats over any other political group.”
Most likely they did. When my husband, a Physicist, saw the latest Pew Research poll showing a 10% advantage to Obama, he crunched the numbers. They’d sampled a 77% greater number of Democrats than Republicans.
He called Pew and spoke with Molly Rohal. Molly said it was a “valid representation” and “not biased”.
How stupid does a person have to be to look at that 77% statistic and interpret it as 50%? Pretty darn stupid.