From what I remember neutrality was poorly explained to the public by people with in a somewhat deceptive way trying to slam dunk sell the issue. So the average person ended up thinking they were opposing unrelated things like vanilla peering agreements or even residential bandwidth caps. Many totally misunderstood the real issue and promptly looked like fools when they tried to talk about it. Perhaps this was all done on purpose to poison-pill the issue right out of the gate. Taking a page out of the CIA/FBI's playbooks.