With the likely end of affirmative action by the Supreme Court looming over us, many news organizations have commissioned polls to ask Americans what they think of the idea. Yesterday CBS News and NPR both released polls on the topic and, well, the conclusions they reached don’t match. NPR‘s story about the poll headlined the results on a question about Roe v. Wade but later on we find this:

• 57%…say they think affirmative action programs in hiring, promoting and college admissions should be continued. More than three-quarters of Democrats said so, but almost 6-in-10 Republicans disagreed.

• Independents were split, 50%-46% in favor of keeping affirmative action programs.

Not an overwhelming result but a pretty strong one for keeping affirmative action around. But as mentioned above, CBS also published a poll yesterday. Their story was headlined “CBS News poll finds most say colleges shouldn’t factor race into admissions.”

The American public feels that many groups face discrimination today and widely believes that racism remains a problem in the country, at least to some degree — but it is more closely divided over affirmative action as a general policy, with a narrow majority supporting it…

…that general view doesn’t extend into the particular mechanism of having college admissions consider an applicant’s race. Looking at the pending Supreme Court decision, Americans’ views tilt to a substantial majority against allowing colleges to consider race.

So affirmative action in general was 53-47 but considering race in college admissions was 30-70. In the CBS poll even a majority of Democrats were against using race in admissions with 55% saying it should not be allowed.

Maybe the CBS poll is just an outlier? Apparently not because a Pew Research poll release earlier this month also found a majority of respondents were against considering race in admisions.

…half of U.S. adults say they disapprove of selective colleges and universities taking prospective students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds into account when making admissions decisions. Fewer (33%) approve of colleges considering race and ethnicity to increase diversity at the schools, while 16% are not sure.

Obviously 50-33 against isn’t nearly as big a split as 70-30 in the CBS poll but at least the overall conclusion agrees. But if we keep going back we find that at the end of May NBC News released a poll on the same topic and it was even more favorable than the NPR poll mentioned above.

Most Americans say the Supreme Court shouldn’t ban colleges and universities from considering applicants’ race in the admission process, according to a new poll released just weeks before the high court seems poised to do just that…

Sixty-three percent of adults polled, across racial and political lines, said the Supreme Court shouldn’t block colleges from taking applicants’ race and ethnicity into account in the admission process.

Finally, if we go back to February of this year, Reuters released a poll which said a majority objected to the use of race in admissions:

Sixty-two percent of Americans say race and ethnicity should not be considered at all in college admissions, according to new Reuters/Ipsos polling on policies at the center of high-profile cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this spring.

The public opinion poll, which surveyed 4,408 adults from Feb. 6-13, found that 73% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats said they were against race-conscious admissions, or affirmative action, which is a practice used by colleges and universities to boost racial diversity within their student bodies.

So to sum all of this up, we have five polls taken within the last four months (there are probably more I missed). Three of them found Americans are against race-based admissions, with a high-water mark of 70-30. Two of the polls found the opposite with a top result of 63% saying the court should not prevent the use of race in admissions.

The bottom line is that the results are all over the map. Usually when that’s the case I suspect it’s because the respondents don’t actually know anything about the issue and are just reacting to the language presented by the poll. So if the poll asks if the court should ban the use of race in admissions a majority say no because banning sounds extreme. But if you ask similar people if race should be used in admissions a majority says no because race based benefits don’t sound fair.

Ultimately, the only reason the polls matter is because the two parties are trying to figure out which side will take a hit if the Supreme Court ends affirmative action. My guess is that many people will see the eruption of outrage on the left and take from that reaction that the right has done something terrible that everyone disagrees with. But I think when you really present people with the unvarnished truth of what’s going on, i.e. should colleges intentionally discriminate now to rectify past discrimination, most people will say no. This issue is a loser for progressives and there’s evidence that’s the case even in blue California. Lucky for the the progressives who support this, there is probably no one in the media who will frame the issue as bluntly as I have.

Update: There was actually a third poll on this topic released yesterday.

A new University of Massachusetts Amherst poll recently found that close to half of its respondents are against affirmative action.

The poll, which had a main sample of 1,000 Americans, plus an oversample of 133 Black Americans, found that Black people are more supportive of affirmative action, with 52% of Black respondents supporting it and just 21% opposing it. On the flip side, only 33% of all respondents support affirmative action, while 44% oppose it.