Remember that Quinnipiac poll purporting to show that 61% of Connecticut voters support legalizing Assisted Suicide? Don’t believe it.
Marist, the polling firm that did especially accurate work for NBC and the Wall Street Journal during the 2012 presidential election, has a newer, more detailed and more accurate poll that refutes the Q poll’s findings.
On Assisted Suicide/aid in dying–and we should note Marist uses neither term, but rather, the same language as the Q poll–70% of state residents do not see it as a significant issue or one that state government should address. A majority of state residents oppose it, 55% to 38%. By 46-32 percent, fewer residents would trust their doctor if he or she were willing to prescribe lethal drugs. And both Q and Marist polls agree that most of those polled would not want to end their own lives by Assisted Suicide.
That one point of agreement between the two polls is significant. For an issue this personal, the standard for passing a law should not be what people want to happen to others. Under such a regime the “right to die” could too easily become the duty to die.
The Marist poll is almost entirely about Assisted Suicide, unlike the Q poll which tacked on three or four questions at the end of a 50-plus question poll on issues ranging from Keno to the economy to Gov. Malloy. Marist’s poll is better suited to understand this complex, layered issue. Even the Q poll’s own press release talked about how personal Assisted Suicide is–all the more reason why Connecticut deserved a poll like Marist’s, which took the time to understand the true support and opposition around this issue.
We also note that Marist’s respondents, unlike the Q poll, are not just voters or people who have the patience to sit through 50 questions on other topics before answering questions about Assisted Suicide. How many elderly people and people with disabilities were left out of the Q poll because they could not sit through all those questions? The Marist poll appears to be a more reliable indicator of what Connecticut residents really think about Assisted Suicide.
