We found two polls in recent months that asked a question along these same lines:
• CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, Sept. 4-8, 2015. The pollsters asked, "Do you happen to know what religion Barack Obama is? Is he Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, something else, or not religious?"
Among all respondents, 29 percent said Obama is "Muslim." While that’s 11 percentage points higher than Pew had found five years earlier, it’s still not as high as the 59 percent figure Iftikhar cited on Meet the Press.
The percentage was higher for Republicans alone -- 43 percent thought Obama is Muslim, compared with 15 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of independents. CNN/ORC surveyed 1,012 adult Americans by landline and cell phones, for a sampling margin of error of 3 percentage points.
• Public Policy Polling poll, Aug. 28-30, 2015. The pollsters asked, "Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?" Public Policy Polling only asked "usual Republican primary voters" -- 572 of them -- this question. The automated survey was conducted by landline and the Internet, with a sampling margin of error of just over 4 percent.
The survey found that 54 percent of the Republican primary electorate thought Obama is a Muslim, compared with just 14 percent who thought he is Christian and 32 percent who said they didn’t know.
So with this survey, we reach a number within striking distance of Iftikhar’s Meet the Press statistic -- but it just describes the views of "usual Republican primary voters," which is only one subset of "Americans."
When we reached out to Iftikhar, he quickly and good-naturedly copped to mangling his talking point.
"You are correct," he wrote via email. "I did mean Republicans from the PPP poll. Nobody is perfect"
