Annabel is svelte on her pretty dancing feet, bare legged with the flowered skirt rustling in the light breeze, as she closes the gate of the white picket fence to enter the garden in bloom via the wisteria pergola. Her toison/hair/fleece is bouffant like a romantic dark-gold Marie Antoinette perruque. Annabel has an old fashioned reed basket like Little Riding Hood on her way to grandma's front door. She knocks.
Behind the curtain window, the politician, to be grilled, is preparing to appear more like a little lamb than a wolf. It's all about image, while the apron is on. He or she knows that the success of the visit resides in perfect scones rather than the made-up crap policies of the day — the skewed-up excuses for these having been on simmer for a couple of days. 
The pollies need to appear like nice blokes or popular sheilas rather than the struggling bastards or cunning idiots they often appear to be. All the kitchen smells of grand fudge and deceptive melbas. Even in Joe's wife house. He could be a great master-barbecue-chef but he could not cook the books of his budgets that smelled like dunny material. Bronwyn soft buns were fluffy and golden, like her beehive, but she was like a rabid Libyan dictator in the speaker's chair. She had to appear demure and strong at the same time, while beating the shit of the pastry. An impossible task.
The point of the kitchen is to make these lunatics appear like nice ordinary people, because they mostly are, but in order to get where they are, they had to mix some unsavoury concoctions and practice political assassinations bordering on poisonous lunacy to the country at large.
So Annabel wants us to believe we're all the same average idiots, ready to cook a fantastic Penne alla fruiti de mare and knife grandma to cash her life insurance, at the same time. 
Of course "information" seems to be the key to knowledge, but we all know that a house is a bit more than a pile of bricks. Here is Annabel:

How is it – in this marvellous age of too much information – that political leaders with access to millions of dollars worth of insights gleaned by pollsters from harried voters trying to cook dinner for their children (plus incalculable volumes of feedback supplied gratis by helpful busybodies on social media) can still remain so resolutely at odds with reality?
It's confounding. Until you realise that we're all like that.
........

Like I said: the human capacity for pellucid self-knowledge tends to be limited no matter where you go.
And when we despise politicians for being out of touch, perhaps we should consider the possibility that – in them – we have elected truer representatives than we realise.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/politicians-no-more-out-of-touch-than-the-rest-of-us-20151204-glfjz5.html#ixzz3tW9HqB8d Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook
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No Annabel, it's not confounding and, talk for yourself if you want, but we're NOT all like this, I hope... And the Pew questions are somewhat discretely loaded for tripping naive people... They could be somewhat designed to elicit erroneous answers, even if we know the right answers or where to look for the right answers. It's a bit like a Q & A session on the ABC where viewpoints prevail over knowledge and most gravitased pundits draw conclusions on the statistics and performance bathed in pre-juiced bananas, rather than the weight of the information.
Sure, we all have our own prejudices. And should this survey by the Pew be on this subject, then we know what to expect.
The media at large (MMMM — mediocre mass media de mierda) is of course at major fault for keeping the intellect of people in most countries below an infantile level. The media thrives on confusing people with emotional reactivity rather than providing true facts and figures. Rabid headlines are the go and our friends at the Daily Telegraph are the masters of this manipulation.
Even publications such as "Information is Beautiful" can soon get out of date on some subjects, due to the shifts of relative humanist positions. For example when it mentions the top wealthy people on the planet, we have to know where the "cut-off" point is. It's an arbitrary decision to choose one hundred million or one billion clams as the benchmark. So instead of having the "one per cent", we can manufacture the "five per cent" or the "12.8 per cent" who own more than a sizeable portion of the total wealth — itself calculated on accordionic figures of exchange rates, while we swim in debt.
Even complex scientific publications can get their knickers in knots, especially when having to deal with humanities, which are art forms rather than sciences. Statistics of lemming behaviour come to mind.
Did you know that more than 85 per cent of people in Sweden do not believe in god, but about 95 per cent in the USA do? 
Did you know that men who are left-handed are likely to be 26 per cent richer than right-handed men, but this statistic does not apply to women?
Did you know that some futurists predict there won't be distinction between humans and machines by 2100?
We, ordinary people don't know everything, but, as you mention, our leaders should be a bit more on the ball — far less of grandstanding expensive polls-driven pricks — because let's face it, instead of useful solid information, what the politicians glean from pollsters is only worth the slanted angry value of what ordinary people think at the time they burn the roast. 
The politicians only want to know to what decimal value if their campaign to hookwin the public through the Daily Telegraph and a few three-word slogans is working. We deserve better from the politicians because more often than not, we are less sociopathic and more astute than the pollies. We are prepared to learn and to admit our mistakes. Try this one with pollies and all you get is more fudge on a slice of apology at best.
Here on YD, we pride ourselves on making sure we employ the best statistics possible though some of the best statistics are still iffy — especially polls. This is why scientists are very conservative about information in their models of global warming.  
And by the way Annabel, I have not found anywhere anything about your position on global warming. It seems you keep your opinion very close to your bosom, unless you don't want to have an opinion for fear of irking your Liberal (CONservative) friends. 
It thus appears, like in all you other area of expertise, you sit on the fence. You bet your two bobs each way without trying to understand really why. That is not a great way to be objective, because the reality sits in one camp only.  The other side waffles and lies, in proportion with what they do not want to know.
If you want to know more about global warming, ask good old uncle Gus.