DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03707.v1
title: CBS News South Dakota State Poll, October 2002
title: Version 1

description: This special topic poll is part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicit public opinion on the presidency and a range of other political and social issues. The study was conducted in part to assess respondents' interest in and opinions about the 2002 gubernatorial and congressional elections in South Dakota. Residents of that state were asked to give their opinions of President George W. Bush and his handling of the presidency, as well as their views of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, his handling of Senate Democrats, and his representation of South Dakota interests. Those queried were asked whether they intended to vote or had already voted through the mail or absentee ballot in the November 5, 2002, elections. Respondents were asked for whom they would vote if the election for governor were held that day, given a choice between Mike Rounds (Republican Party) and Jim Abbott (Democratic Party). Similarly, they were asked to make a choice between John Thune (Republican Party) and Tim Johnson (Democratic Party) for United States Senate, and between Bill Janklow (Republican Party) and Stephanie Herseth (Democratic Party) for United States Representative. Additional topics related to the Senate election focused on the involvement of people and groups from outside South Dakota, whether the respondent's vote could be thought of as a vote for/against Bush and/or Daschle, and whether either candidate had attacked the other unfairly. Respondents were asked to assess the importance of the following issues in their electoral decision-making: possible United States military action against Iraq, drought relief for South Dakota, the economy, and which political party controlled the United States Senate. Additional topics covered whether the economy and jobs, or terrorism and national security, should be the higher priority for the nation, whether respondents supported or opposed the United States taking military action to try to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, and whether respondents intended to vote through the mail, absentee ballot, or at their precinct polling place. Background information on respondents includes age, gender, political party, political orientation, voter registration and participation history, method of voting in previous elections, education, religion, marital status, Hispanic descent, race, years in community, and household income.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created variable labels and/or value labels..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: Dataset
description: CBS News/New York Times Poll Series
description: This collection has not been processed by ICPSR staff. ICPSR is distributing the data and documentation for this collection in essentially the same form in which they were received. When appropriate, documentation has been converted to Portable Document Format (PDF), data files have been converted to non-platform-specific formats, and variables have been recoded to ensure respondents' anonymity.
The ASCII data file may have been replaced if the previous version was formatted with multiple records per case. A frequency file, which contains the authoritative column locations, has been added to the collection.
description: Adult population of the state of South Dakota aged 18 and over having a telephone at home.
description: A variation of random-digit dialing using primary sampling units (PSUs) was employed, consisting of blocks of 100 telephone numbers identical through the eighth digit and stratified by geographic region, area code, and size of place. Within households, respondents were selected using a method developed by Leslie Kish and modified by Charles Backstrom and Gerald Hursh (see Backstrom and Hursh, SURVEY RESEARCH. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963).