I don't think that's misleading, I think that's almost exactly the GP's point. People don't just vote on the issues, usually they vote one abstraction higher on the brand and the rhetoric around it.
It'd be intriguing to see what people would think if you made them decide whether they agreed/disagreed with the language of the bill itself (or a summary—by, say, a supreme-court justice—of the implications of the bill), with no mention of the name of the bill.
The specific point where they get angry is when you do a sweeping reveal that, gasp, "it was [hated bill] after all!", though, right? The question doesn't have to come with a "punchline"; you can just poll people once for their opinions about named bills, and then again separately for their opinions about un-named bill contents, and correlate these, without ever revealing to the second group what bills the quoted language comes from.
Or do you mean to suggest that people get angry immediately when they realize they're being asked for their genuine opinion about something which might turn out to be something they're expected to toe a party line about? If so, that's a very interesting effect, possibly a chilling effect to any potential for genuine informal conversation about these bills.
In my limited experience, people get angry when they feel tricked, so the former of those two suggestions.
I agree that you could not tell them and get some good info.
"...show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate that voters--even those who are well informed and politically engaged--mostly choose parties and candidates on the basis of social identities and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They also show that voters adjust their policy views and even their perceptions of basic matters of fact to match those loyalties. When parties are roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on irrelevant or misleading considerations such as economic spurts or downturns beyond the incumbents' control; the outcomes are essentially random. Thus, voters do not control the course of public policy, even indirectly."
Those of us doing policy work using educate and persuade strategies need to adapt, up our game.
