Our first idea was that it was July and readers needed a break from weighty political topics, so we would have a poll about summer movies.
The problem with that, as a moment's thought demonstrates, is that the two obvious movies, 'Oppenheimer' and 'Barbie,' both deal with chewy topics: gender and the construction of self, the moral responsibility of the creators of vast destructive power, the relationship of men to patriarchy and the deaths of innocent people in the context of a just war.
By that standard, asking people who the best or worst prime minister of the last half-century or so, as we also did this week, seems fairly tame.
In any case, we asked which of the two movies you had seen, or planned to see:
It must be said that this is quite different from what's been seen at the box office, where 'Barbie' has so far made more or less twice as much as 'Oppenheimer' globally, as of this week.
But what caused the distortion?
Our first thought was gender. Did respondents skew heavily male?
This turns out not to be the case - there was a more or less equal gender balance - but movie preferences were quite gendered:
It turns out to be possible to cross-reference the poll results to attitudes about Justin Trudeau:
Once we look at age, the problem is solved. This movie choice turns out to be strongly influenced by age, and our voter pool skews older: 65% of voters were over 60, and half of those were over 70:
In any case, northern readers were more inclined to prefer 'Barbie':
