Missives From The LIzard People. Or on the National Conspiracy Poll.

The National Conspiracy Poll is out.  You can read the whole thing here (pdf) and a shorter summary of some results here.

It may be fun to think of people believing that shape-shifting lizard people rule the world (ahem), but what really matters in those results are the answers which show large differences on the basis of party affiliation.  Because that suggests either that information matters less than basic wishes about what is desirable  or that the respondents believe in different sources of information.  Most likely the latter.

The findings which show differences by party affiliation are about whether global warming is a hoax,  whether there is a New World Order, whether Obama is the anti-Christ, whether Bush misled on Iraq WMDs, whether Saddam was involved in 9/11 atrocities and whether the CIA spread crack in inner cities.  (Note that I haven't done statistical tests on the significance of these differences, just picked the ones which show large percentage differences).

The questions with the largest party-based differences, large enough to create reversals of what the majority in each grouping believes, are whether Bush misled on Iraq WMDs (72% of Democrats believe he did,  73% of Republicans believe he did not, Independents were divided with 48% believing he did and 45% believing that he did not) and whether global warming is a hoax or not (58% of Republicans believe it is,  77% of Democrats believe it is not and 51% of Independents believe it is not).

The rest of the questions are kinda fun, too.  There are a few differences by gender in some of the questions though I spot no overall pattern.  But the youngest age group among the respondents seems more likely to believe in lizard people and bigfoots (bigfeet?) and so on.