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POLITICS

Voters Still Consider NSA Spying As Least Serious Scandal but Most Likely to Linger

Roughly half of voters still think the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi matter and the Justice Department’s secret probe of reporters’ records are serious scandals. The National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program is viewed less seriously but seen as the most likely to be a lingering story.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 39% of Likely U.S. Voters regard the NSA’s secret surveillance of Americans’ phone and e-mail communications as a serious scandal. That’s down slightly from 43% two months ago. Thirty-two percent (32%) now think it’s an embarrassing situation but not a scandal. Twenty-one percent (21%) say it’s no big deal. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on September 8-9, 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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