I'm curious - what did you expect to see in the results for some/all of these questions vs what was actually shown to be the case?
Let me start by pointing out that I expected people who are thinking more critically about these issues or who care about them most to comment on their responses, as you, Jingles, The Free Hornet, and I have. I'm well aware that any poll on this site will be flawed by its very nature.
That said, I expected to see a breakdown like this on issues that have different scores:
About 50-60% support for non-"liberty candidates" who support some policies (I expected to find more support for non-libertarians who share at least a somewhat similar list of concerns.)
About 50-60% support for abortion up to the 3rd trimester (The current Roe v Wade standard. I expected more people to be knowledgeable about abortion and to have more "liberal" views regarding it. I was very shocked to find support for the idea that embryos are persons, which the current poll question was partly aimed at discovering numerically.)
About 80% support for civil marriage equality (I really didn't expect to find that many people thought that equality would be a horrible expansion of federal power, given the human equality focus attributed to the movement. It makes me wonder if 50% or more would support abortion bans that criminalize mothers who take the "day after" pill/Plan B.)
About 60-70% support for separation of church and state (My impression was that the "Freedom FROM religion" and "public means anything goes" people were a small minority. I expected people to be more educated about the history of the debate on church & state separation and how important it is to generalized liberty.)
About 5% support (or less) for governance based on personal interpretations of the bible. (The support for this is beyond me.)
I didn't have a particular percentage in mind, but I expected atheism to be a divisive point, and to actually be more divisive than Islam. I'm shocked by the lack of prejudice against atheists, and the comparative prejudice against muslims.
I expected 70-80% for science broadly, and expected the "only" qualifier to matter more to people when they considered the "ideology" option. I'm surprised to see people ignoring the "only" part and interpreting "ideological principle" as "guiding principle". I wonder if using "ideology" instead would have produced the hesitance that I anticipated. The option was designed to test people's commitment to their personal view of how absolutist their voting patterns should be, though, and it certainly seems to have succeeded in that.
I expected an 80-90% rate for coalitions. I'm pretty shocked by the absolutism here. I'm more shocked by the commented response that supports coalitions, but only if they don't involve any compromise. I really think that the anti-coalition & anti-compromise views are one of the top three reasons why people refuse to listen to "liberty advocates", why the GOP doesn't want Paul supporters in the party, and why the media figures generally refuse to see Paul supporters as anything but fringe though they seemed to take a liking to some TEA Party groups even before the corporate & "social/religious conservative" takeover of many TEA Party groups.
And I should note, Ron Paul is totally against the idea of not forming coalitions and not making compromises that move in his preferred political directions. That's part of why the absolutism here (and at the Daily Paul) is so stunning to me, even though I'm well aware that some supporters disagree with Paul on things (including myself).
On the opposite side, I'm delightfully surprised by the response to voting for a not-Paul candidate in order to get a 3-way debate. The almost worship of Paul that I've seen by some people here and at the DailyPaul led me to believe that many people are absolutist about the candidate to the point of not voting or writing in Paul even if the write-in vote wouldn't count because of regulations about collecting signatures beforehand. However, I can't reconcile the lack of candidate absolutism with the prevalence of non-"liberty candidate" absolutism. The difference may simply be that people are leery of non-"liberty candidates" and generally assume them to be liars or something, or their leeriness led them to interpret "some positions" as "few positions".
I expected maybe 10-20% to think that scientific communities were untrustworthy, because of the religiosity/FOX News crowd, but I was surprised by the responses saying that science is unreliable. My guess is that the view comes from global warming, with maybe some stuff about drug side effects. People with those views tend to not have any experience in the related scientific field, and isolate themselves from conflicting news and research - so that's not surprising.
It does seem possible that I tend to overestimate people's experience with science, and - moreover - that those who have experience with it consider those experiences to be scientific rather than just "knowledge from trial and error".
I was blown away by the "everyday Americans" response. I probably expected 50% at most, but I can't really say what my frame of mind was, now that I've been exposed. It truly baffles me that people believe any one of three things: (1) think that non-professionals are better at making decisions on topics of others' research, (2) that people are not prone to a multitude of psychological and physiological errors in perception, understanding, and reasoning, or (3) that it is ok to leave decisions up to people with no advanced knowledge (at best) or who have not deeply considered (at worst) the issues that they are responsible for and which will have a strong impact on others' lives. I realize that part of this is because I have a background in human factors research, but there's also part of me that just doesn't get the idea that people shouldn't have governance/people will freely make decisions and contracts that would produce a world desirable enough that we shouldn't have governance.
Despite how much crap I'll get for saying this here: People are fundamentally error-prone and unable to consider relevant information for decision-making in all of the key areas of their lives, and - as a result - cannot govern themselves to a degree that is worth doing so, given the benefits provided by governance by people who have spent their lives learning about information that is relevant to those key areas and who can work together to govern. Free markets do not produce nearly as well as does limited governance by good, educated people. If they did, then organizations wouldn't have hierarchies.
And though I understand the motivation behind the idea of leaving people alone (and support the idea that every state should have a "liberty region" for those who don't want to participate in a system of governance adopted by the state), I feel that there is a moral imperative to have governance in order to produce better outcomes for everyone.
Now, as I've stated many times, I don't think that putting too much power in the hand of people or having a large system of governance is good, and I think that all people should be able to leave a system that they disagree with. I think that there should be competition of all sorts. That's why I'm a limited government, public-oriented, and generally "the local level is supreme" voter and advocate. You can do things however you want in region X, and I'll do things with people who work with me in region Y.
I didn't expect there to be much disagreement about the term "rights" as far as 'rights granted" goes. I see
some rights as a special class of privileges, so this was an oversight on my part. I think that the difference has messed up the results a little bit, but I did expect there to be a significant amount of belief that any "real right" is inherent/ungranted somehow.
I'm quite surprised by the opposition to establishing new policies. For one because civil marriage was part of the list, and that got a decent level of support (though not what I expected), and also because internet freedom is a big issue for many Paul supporters. People may not agree about net neutrality, but I figured that the "net" part would get people thinking about new laws that are needed because the founders couldn't have envisioned contemporary society. My guess is that the reason is belief in privatizing everything/completely free markets/everyday Americans.
I'm also surprised that banning economic policies is only at 75%. I expected more support for that. My guess is that some people just object to banning anything - again because they don't want the government to have almost any power - if they even think it should exist.
