Thanks, that was very interesting and sad. I guess the constituency against the telescope is small, vocal and concentrated, whereas the pro-telescope constituency is much larger, but very distributed and not very motivated.
Yup, broad shallow support (even among Native Hawaiians, according to some polls) pitted against narrow, very intense and dedicated opposition.
If we're thinking of the same poll, it was conducted in 2015 and the polling was backed by Caltech, who has a vested interest in TMT and neither the instrument or the raw data were available for other researchers to analyze.
An independent poll conducted by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2018 found that 72 percent of Native Hawaiians (registered voters) support TMT, 23 percent oppose it and 5 percent were undecided.