New Poll Breaks Record For Honest Answers

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In my Twitter feed, everyone is getting a big kick out of the question on the right from a recent PPP national poll of Republicans. Agrabah, it turns out, is the fictional city where Aladdin lives in the 1992 Disney cartoon. I’ve never seen the movie, so I didn’t know this before today.

Anyway, as much as I applaud PPP for turning their polls into a continuing series of jokes, I think people are taking the wrong lesson from this. Is it shocking that 30 percent of Republicans want to bomb a city they’ve never heard of? Not really. Maybe they confused it with Ar Raqqah, the ISIS capital. Maybe this was just a way of showing that they support a stronger bombing campaign in general. Who knows?

No, the big news here is that 57 percent admitted they weren’t sure. This is amazing. In polls like this, “Not Sure” usually gets about 10 percent, even for questions that it’s dead certain most people have no clue about. Overall, this poll question demonstrates an admirable ability to admit ignorance. That’s far less common than you might think.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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