I don’t really know what to make of these survey results on which candidate is a riskier or safer choice, but it’s interesting.
But my favorite recent question wording example remains this one reported in the New York Times from a CBS News poll in 2006:
Should U.S. troops stay in Iraq as long as it takes to make sure Iraq has a stable democracy, even if it takes a long time, or leave as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable?
What interested me about this particular survey item was not so much whether it is “slanted” but rather that it contained such a big implicit assumption (that if the troops stay long enough, that Iraq will have a stable democracy), and it seemed that the survey writers, the people at CBS, and the people at the New York Times all just took the assumption for granted. At least, I didn’t see any comments on it.