The latest poll numbers came from a Washington Post/ABC poll.

Note the different conclusions drawn on the reasons for these results:

The main reason for the endurance of the apparently groundless belief, experts in public opinion say, is a deep and enduring distrust of Hussein that makes him a likely suspect in anything related to Middle East violence. "It's very easy to picture Saddam as a demon," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and an expert on public opinion and war. "You get a general fuzz going around: People know they don't like al Qaeda, they are horrified by September 11th, they know this guy is a bad guy, and it's not hard to put those things together."

Although that belief came without prompting from Washington, Democrats and some independent experts say Bush exploited the apparent misconception by implying a link between Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the months before the war with Iraq. "The notion was reinforced by these hints, the discussions that they had about possible links with al Qaeda terrorists," said Andrew Kohut, a pollster who leads the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

The poll data can be found here. Significantly, it also shows near the bottom other polls that gave similar results. Were they all due to Bush's "allowing people to infer" things?

Note the high numbers right after the attack (Sept. 13, 2001), when as far as I know, nobody had any real evidence to blame anybody at all, and certainly not Saddam specifically. Also, I don't think Saddam came up in any administration speeches or other influential sources at that time.

This would tend to reinforce the reasoning given by the pollsters, that general hostility toward Saddam would be enough to generate some of these numbers, and not a deliberate public relations ploy by the administration.

Also, most of the 70 percent come from the "somewhat likely" category, which isn't exactly something you take to the bank.