Thursday, October 11, 2012
When John F. Kennedy ran for the presidency in 1960, many considered his Catholic faith a total disqualifier. Now fewer than half of voters regard a candidate’s religious beliefs as important at all to how they will vote, much less the deciding factor.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters now rate a candidate’s religious faith as important to their vote, while slightly more (51%) do not.
These figures include only 19% for whom the faith of a candidate is Very Important. That’s down 16 points, though, from 35% in November 2006. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
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The national survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on October 3-4, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Fieldwork for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC . See methodology.
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Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade. To learn more about our methodology, click here.
