> Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology

I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample:

  These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda." At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.

The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue? Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always have opposing sides.