I just took a Pew Center online poll designed to gather the views of people involved in the Dean primary campaign. It seemed like a decent polls but when we were asked for our opinions on some key issues, I felt that the either/or choices offered were subliminally slanting the issues in a media-inflected way that tends to favor the rightward drift in US politics of the last few decades.
The poll included a space for comments at the end, and this is what I wrote:
I felt that some of the political dichotomies were presented with a right-wing biased frame, although they were consistent with the current realm of media “centrism,” such as it is.
I feel that I am conservative and liberal, and that as I am pragmatic and willing to compromise to achieve as much good as possible, that I am also moderate as well. I am neither a left-wing socialist/communist extremist nor a right-wing authoritarian/fascist extremist.
In my view the Democratic party is coalition of liberals and conservatives, and the Republican party is a coalition of plutocrats, social reactionaries, and right-wing extremists, and populists who seem not to understand how power, money, and capitalism truly work.
Thus, I would appreciate it if surveys tried to go beyond simple conventional bipolar political axes and tried to range more into the issues of communitarianism, statism, authoritarianism, and libertarianism.