The top line in Figure 1 tracks the percentage of “less area” responses on surveys from June 2011 to September 2015. A red triangle at far left shows the corresponding percentage from a nationwide survey in 2011, which came in quite close to New Hampshire.

Which of the following three statements do you think is more accurate? Over the past few years, the ice on the Arctic Ocean in late summer ... Covers less area than it did 30 years ago. Declined but then recovered to about the same area it had 30 years ago. Covers more area than it did 30 years ago. don’t know/no answer

As longtime ASIB readers may know, my colleagues and I have been tracking US public perceptions of Arctic change. This started with analysis of questions written by others for the nationwide General Social Survey in 2006 and 2010, then shifted to our own questions placed on another nationwide survey in 2011, and a continuing series of statewide New Hampshire surveys since then. Results have been highlighted in several posts here by Neven ( June 2015 , August 2013 , April 2013) that refer to some of the underlying research articles. Our most recent article, “ Polar facts in the age of polarization ,” in Polar Geography, is a good source for question wording, analysis and citations to earlier work (write if you want a copy). Figure 1 below updates one of the graphs from that paper, adding data through September 2015.

Most respondents, around 65 to 75 percent, knew or guessed correctly that ice area has decreased. What about the rest? Sometimes wrong answers are as interesting as the right ones. The Polar Geography paper showed that right answers on sea ice have a strong political pattern. Figure 2 approaches this from a different direction, tracking who mistakenly thinks that Arctic sea ice has recovered.

Figure 2

New Hampshire is a small state (1.3 million people) that briefly achieves notoriety every four years due to its first-in-the-nation presidential primary elections. Residents bask in the attention of presidential candidates appearing at countless small local events, and pollsters phoning every other evening to ask who we are going to vote for. Some people regard such polls as a nuisance, although personally I relish the chance to have my “vote” counted many times.

One such telephone poll (that did not call me) took place last month from September 17 to 23. This poll, sponsored by WMUR-TV and CNN, was conducted by the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire. It included questions testing hypothetical matches between Donald Trump (the Republican front-runner) and three possible Democratic candidates — Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Each question had this form:

Suppose the 2016 presidential election was being held today and the candidates were Donald Trump, the Republican, and Hillary Clinton, the Democrat, who would you vote for?

Trump

Clinton

other

don’t know/undecided

Coincidentally, the same poll carried our question about Arctic sea ice.

Since the hypothetical voting and Arctic sea ice questions were on the same poll, I was curious to see what happens if you cross them. The answer is in Figure 3. The upper panel simply shows the Trump/Clinton match, 42% to 50% in this survey. The lower panel shows that 45 percent of Trump supporters compared with 85 percent of Clinton supporters knew or guessed correctly that late-summer Arctic sea ice in recent years covered less area than it did 30 years ago.



Figure 3

While Clinton led Trump in this poll (50% to 42%), the other Democrats fared somewhat better (Sanders over Trump 57% to 37%; Biden over Trump 56% to 37%). In all three cases, there was a strong partisan pattern in sea ice beliefs — gaps of 35 to 40 points between supporters of Trump and each Democrat.