What it means to be "on board" is to endorse the leader's agenda. The context here is supporting the Moon landings rather than supporting any particular political candidate. (And recall that JFK only barely edged out Nixon in the extremely close 1960 election.) The question is not which candidate a non-voter would vote for, if forced to choose. That's why I mentioned the lesser of evils phenomenon.
Also, non-voters are consistently at least 1/3 of the population, regardless of the "closeness" of the election, and there's not necessarily a correlation between closeness and turnout.
If that's the definition of "on board", we really don't have any useful information on if citizens (or residents) are on board or not. Other than if they stage a protest, they're probably not on board, but then again we don't know how many of the people who didn't attend the protest aren't on board but didn't go to the protest for whatever reason.
I don't think there were protests about the moon landing, but maybe some small ones I never heard about.
> a) I don't think a Gallup poll is useful information :P
I'm not sure why you're here commenting on the Gallup poll article then, or how you think we would ever have useful information about the public?
b) I thought we were talking about being onboard in landslide elections, as you quoted so many messages ago.
Again, the context is the submitted link. I can't speak for the OP, but I'm guessing the idea was that a landslide election is supposed to give the winner a "mandate" for their agenda.
Also, non-voters are consistently at least 1/3 of the population, regardless of the "closeness" of the election, and there's not necessarily a correlation between closeness and turnout.