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POLITICS

Support for Deepwater Drilling Up to 59%

Support for deepwater oil drilling has reached its highest level since the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico one year ago.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that 59% now say deepwater drilling should be allowed. Twenty-two percent (22%) oppose deepwater drilling, while another 20% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Support for deepwater drilling is up from 53% in September of last year. Support dropped to a low of 47% in July 2010.

Two-out-of-three voters (67%) now support offshore oil drilling, the highest level of support since the spill last April.  Seventy-six percent (76%) do not think the United States does enough to develop its own gas and oil resources which perhaps helps to explain why opposition to President Obama's continuing ban on oil drilling off the Eastern seaboard and in the eastern portion of the Gulf of Mexico is up from early December when the policy was first announced.

(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.

The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on April 17-18, 2011 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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