Measuring State Public Opinion with the Senate National Election Study

The surveys of Senate races from 1988 to 1992 conducted by the American National Election Study include a number of issue questions that can be aggregated to measure state public opinion. A simple-to-compute coefficient is used to judge the aggregated reliability of these measures. A comparison of these state public opinion measures on specific issues to more general indicators, such as state ideology and partisanship, demonstrates their usefulness in obtaining a richer depiction of public preferences for studies of state politics.