AMTRAK Media Center reports Study shows Americans favor investing in passenger rail transportation. This is the Study Executive Summary.
As much as I would like to see such interest levels... 1000 registered voters. Hmmm. A mighty small cross section. Easily skewed. I would like to see a much larger sampling done, more like 100,000. If that showed the same results, then I'd be happy.
I was not called. I doubt if any other TB members were also. 1000 respondents are about one-tenth of one percent of US adult population, less than the number of people who ride the NEC in one week. That's not skewed, that's laughable.
And as usual, we don't know how the question was phrased. If the question was "Can we bill your credit card $100 today and each year after to invest in rail transportation?", the outcome would likely be different.
Considering how many times people have been told the railroads can't or won't operate passenger trains with no evidence at all, it's no surprise. Railroads only joined Amtrak to get out from under the ICC's thumb, so somebody would discontinue the unpopular trains they wanted to drop.
So if you go to the Executive Summary linked in the initial post, you see 1000 voters sampled online with a 3.1% margin of error. You also read all the questions in the call out boxes. All those things indicate a potentially valid poll. TO really assess the data however, we need to see the demographics - how many men, how many women, income levels etc. The sample size is in line with what Gallop and other polling organizations use for all sorts of national polls. My own gut is this is a good data point, but self-selected internet polls (which this is) have issues and we don't know if they are addressed by the pollsters.
There's a lot of polling result "news" in this era, all designed to fill web pages, garner interest and further someone's agenda.
