For Voters, NSA Case is Less of A Scandal but More of A Problem
Of the four major controversies now swirling around the Obama administration, the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance of the phone and e-mail traffic of millions of Americans is the one voters least consider a serious scandal. But as controversies go, they rate it slightly ahead of the others as a problem for the administration.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 51% of Likely U.S. Voters consider both the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative organizations and the White House’s explanation of what happened when the U.S. ambassador was killed in Benghazi, Libya last year as serious scandals. That’s unchanged from six weeks ago.
Twenty-five percent (25%) view the IRS matter as an embarrassing situation but not a scandal, while 19% say it’s not big deal. Similarly, 23% consider the Benghazi affair to be an embarrassing situation but not a scandal. Seventeen percent (17%) see it as no big deal. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 30-July 1, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
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