[radford-neal]

The article says that 74% think that "Race or ethnicity" "Shouldn’t Be Considered" in college admissions. This implies that at least 74% don't support "affirmative action", which must be based on considering race or ethnicity. Actually, if the poll results are to be believed, opposition to affirmative action must be higher than 74%, since presumably some of the 26% who want to take race or ethnicity into consideration are white supremacists who want to exclude blacks.

So your comment is baffling. Best I can do to make sense of it is that you think a lot of people who support affirmative action lied when responding to the question?

[welshwelsh]

Unfortunately the framing matters a lot, and people are not logically consistent in their preferences. The only way to know if people support affirmative action is to ask them "do you support affirmative action?"

This reminds me of when Andrew Yang's campaign found that Americans are much more supportive of universal basic income proposals if you call it a "Freedom Dividend" instead of UBI. I imagine whether the proposal comes from a Republican or a Democrat also would have a big impact.

What you can't do is try to determine if someone supports a policy in the abstract and then assume that they must have the same attitude towards a real implementation of that policy.