Their constituents seem to like the idea of protecting civil rights. No news outlets thus far has picked up the results of a survey commissioned by the ACLU on the attitudes of voters in four battleground states, but they're nothing that Pennsylvania's Rooster Santorum will crow about. A random sample of voters in Connecticut, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania strongly express a preference for candidates who oppose policies that President Bush has sought in the name of fighting terrorism:
* Extraordinary rendition: Seven in ten would vote for a candidate who opposes "allowing government agents to capture people in foreign countries and secretly fly them to other countries, and then torture them to gather information about terrorism," over a candidate who supports it;
* Torture: More than two-thirds would vote for a candidate who opposes "the government torturing prisoners to gather information about terrorism," over a candidate who supports it;
* Military tribunals: Six in ten would vote for a candidate who opposes "putting detainees at Guantanamo military base on trial in military tribunals at which the suspects are NOT allowed to see all of the evidence against them and the government could use hearsay evidence obtained during the interrogation of other terrorist suspects" over a candidate who supports this; and
* Holding detainees without charges: Six in ten would vote for a candidate who opposes "the government holding detainees at Guantanamo military base as it has for the past five years without charging them with a crime or without access to a lawyer," over a candidate who supports this.
[The random sample telephone interview survey was conducted for the ACLU by the Washington, D.C.-based polling firm of Belden Russonello & Stewart Sept. 13-25, 2006, and has a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percent.]
What I found particularly interesting was the voters' rejection of candidates who support President: Bush's handling of the "war on terror": Connecticut (49 percent vs. 35 percent); New Mexico (56 percent vs. 31 percent); Ohio (52 percent vs. 33 percent); and Pennsylvania (58 percent vs. 30 percent).
You can answer the poll questions yourself and compare them to the official results here.
Disclosure: I'm a board member of the Pittsburgh ACLU, which passed along the survey results to me.