Originally Posted by
Kgmm77
Leaving aside the correctness or otherwise of disregarding the views 30-40% of the population (although I agree their position is likely to only be transient and very influenced by the here and now), I’m not sure your maths works. If you take the 40% away who want to wear masks forever, you’re still left with 50% of the remaining respondents (30%) who want a time bound requirement to wear masks. So not a minority.
I don’t quite understand how you’ve arrived at that conclusion. Now we don’t know the exact question, it can influence the result, and these things are rarely binary anyway.
But let’s make the reasonable assumption that it was something like “Do you support the continued mandatory wearing of masks in shops and on public transport?”.
The options would then be presented as:
“No” - 30% voted for this option
“Permanently” - 40% voted for this option
Now clearly anyone answering yes to permanently is also going to do the same for “until Covid is eliminated” and “another month”. Ergo, if you feel that those people aren’t living in the real world and their opinions may not entirely make sense to any sane person, you back them out to normalise the result.
That leaves 30% from the original respondents who support the continued use for a month. That is not a majority.
If I got results seen here - do we really believe that many people support a curfew? - if I were the polling company I think I’d be checking the demographic makeup of my sample.
Lies, damn lies and statistics, eh?