Rush Limbaugh's listeners and viewers of the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11" inhabit parallel partisan universes with sharply distinct perceptions of political reality.

The National Annenberg Election Survey, conducted last month, found that the audiences for the conservative broadcaster and the liberal filmmaker were roughly the same size. Both groups tended to be better educated and more affluent than the population as a whole, but beyond those similarities there was almost no overlap between the two.

The conservative/liberal dichotomy in the two audiences was predictable. What was noteworthy in the data, in light of widespread speculation on the polemical film's election-year impact, was that "Fahrenheit 9/11" appeared to have reinforced rather than changed the views of its audience, according to the Annenberg analysts.

"What Limbaugh and Moore have done is find the hard-core partisan audience," Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said in a statement released with the poll results.

"One-sided partisan communication tends to attract an audience of believers and reinforces their beliefs rather than change their minds. Even when such communication attracts people who know they will disagree but want to see what the other side is saying, it tends to reinforce their partisanship because they develop counter arguments."

In the survey conducted from July 5 to July 25, roughly 8 percent of those interviewed said they had seen the Moore film, while 7 percent said they had listened to Limbaugh's broadcast in the previous week. Among the 5,051 adults surveyed, only 12, or one-quarter of 1 percent, were Limbaugh listeners who had also seen the Moore film.

The Annenberg analysts said that 41 percent of the movie's audience said that it had made them think worse of President Bush, but they noted that 60 percent of those were Democrats to begin with. Similarly, the independents who said the film made them think less of Bush tended to be more liberal than most independents and more likely to have voted for Al Gore in 2000.

The survey found that so few Republicans had seen the movie that it was impossible to draw meaningful statistical conclusions about them -- although the almost complete lack of a GOP audience was noteworthy, if not surprising, in and of itself.

While Jamieson noted that the two polemicists attracted "hard-core partisan audience[s]," the electorate as a whole is nearly as polarized on views of Bush.

Among the Limbaugh listeners, 88 percent approved of the way Bush is handling his job, while only 12 percent disapproved. That is nearly identical to the views of the Republicans in the survey, for whom the Bush job numbers were 87 percent approval and 12 percent disapproval.

Among those who viewed "Fahrenheit 9/11," only 13 percent approved of Bush's job performance and 86 percent disapproved. That was only slightly more negative than the numbers among Democrats -- 20 percent approval and 78 percent disapproval.

Of the Limbaugh cohorts, 85 percent approved of Bush's handling of the economy and 86 percent of his approach to the war on terror. Only 15 percent of the Moore audience approved of Bush's performance in those areas.

For the public as a whole, there was an even split on Bush's job performance, 49 percent to 49 percent. A majority disapproved of his handling of the economy, 52 percent to 44 percent; and 49 percent approved of his handling of terrorism vs. 48 percent who disapproved.

Thirty-seven percent of the Limbaugh group and 41 percent of the Moore audience had college degrees, compared with 26 percent of the total survey sample. Thirty-seven percent of Limbaugh's audience and 32 percent of Moore's had incomes of $75,000 or more, compared with 24 percent of the total.

The Annenberg survey consisted of telephone interviews with 5,051 adults, including 432 who said they had seen "Fahrenheit 9/11'' and 395 who said they had listened to Limbaugh's radio broadcast in the last week. The theoretical margin of error for responses of the two audiences was plus or minus 5 percentage points.