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[quote user="V.Payne"] Once past this point I had a few other polls to post. But lets ask the negative question. Can one find a poll showing support for eliminating NRPC accross the electorate? [/quote] Professional pollsters know that asking a negative question biases the outcome and, therefore, it is an invalid technique. The idea is to keep the poll as bias free as possible.  The best way to get there is through open ended questions that don't prompt a desired response.  The flaw in the polls that you referenced is they are not based on a valid statistical sample.  Therefore, all the pollsters can say is that the respondents said this or that. That is different than being able to say that the public or the people or Americans said such and such.   If a pollster found that a majority of the respondents said that they wanted to eliminate Amtrak and, moreover, the poll was not based on a valid statistical sample, I would have the same problem with it as I have with attempting to project the results from a non-statistical sample to the population as a whole. Hopefully, the pollster would know to frame the question in terms of Amtrak, which many people would have difficulty identifying, but some would get it, as opposed to NRPC. Very few Americans know what NRPC means. People say all kinds of things in a poll, especially if it is a telephone poll, and there is no follow-up, i.e. one on one interviews or focus groups.  Moreover, as a rule, the pollsters don't really know who they are talking to and in most instances are unable to gauge the knowledge of the respondents. At the end of WWII the nation's passenger railroads invested the equivalent of billions of dollars in new equipment.  They fielded some fantastic trains.  It was all for naught.  By the middle fifties it was clear that people were deserting them in droves for planes and cars.  That is the poll that counts.  It is not what people say they will do; it is what they do.
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