A blogger at the Washington Post has unearthed an interesting disparity in those poll figures showing a significant number of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim.  And what he’s uncovered is intriguing:

A widely reported poll from the Pew Research Center pegs the number of Americans who believe President Obama is a Muslim at 18 percent. Matt Drudge and others prefer the “shock” Time-SRBI poll showing 24 percent holding this false notion.

What’s behind the big difference between these polls, and which is right?

Those seeking a single number are bound for disappointment: it’s extraordinarily tough to measure the extent of this misperception. The “closed-ended” question format adds to this difficulty, since presenting people with incorrect answer choices may encourage such responses. The president’s detractors are particularly apt to believe negative things about him, and in both polls, most of those who say Obama is a Muslim disapprove of his job performance.

This propensity to assign false, pejorative labels points to one difference between the polls: in the Time poll, 45 percent say they disapprove of the way the president is doing his job, while Pew shows that number at 41 percent.

Question wording is another differentiator: Time pollsters asked, “Do you personally believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim or a Christian,” dangling red meat in front of the president’s opponents. The Pew question presented respondents with a more extensive list: “Now, thinking about Barack Obama’s religious beliefs … Do you happen to know what Barack Obama’s religion is? Is he Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, or something else?”

Fully 44 percent of those who disapprove of the president in the Time-SRBI poll picked the Muslim option, far higher than the 30 percent of disapprovers who selected Muslim in the Pew poll.

Priming is a third potential source of variation. Briefly, the Time poll tackles the Islamic community center issue, whereas Pew focuses on religion more broadly. The mosque controversy likely primes partisanship, which in turn influences answers to the subsequent survey items.

There’s much more, including links to the surveys, at the WaPo link.

UPDATE:  Okay.  That’s enough.  Comments closed.  Internet where I am is spotty, and I can’t monitor it frequently enough to keep up with those who are hijacking this thread to advance their own agendas.