Most voters have a favorable opinion of President Obama’s response to the recent shootings in Arizona but feel the incident will have no lasting impact on the political debate in the country.
As the nation prepares to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, Americans show little confidence in the state of race relations in the country today and into the future.
Despite the change of control in the House, voters continue to believe Congress can screw things up worse than they already are.
Voters continue to believe the average Democrat in Congress is more liberal than they are, but remain more evenly divided about Republicans.
A year ago today, a massive earthquake hit the island of Haiti, killing thousands of people and making thousands more homeless. One-in-three Americans (32%) say they have contributed or will contribute to help the ongoing relief effort there, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Americans have closely followed news stories about the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six others in Arizona on Saturday, and most don’t feel politics was the cause of it.
Voters continue to feel the Republican agenda in Congress is less extreme than that of congressional Democrats.
With opposing political parties controlling the House and Senate, chances for repealing the national health care law appear slim, so some opponents have suggested that Republicans in the House refuse to fund portions of the law.
Voters see “Tea Party” a bit less negatively as a political label these days, while “liberal” and “progressive” have lost ground even among Democrats.
Already? The new Congress, with Republicans in control of the House, isn’t even seated yet, and voters are already expressing more likely disappointment than they did around Election Day.
Barely two weeks separated the close of one session of Congress and the opening of another if the national legislators gather in Washington, D.C. this Wednesday as planned to get on with the nation’s business. But two sessions of Congress could scarcely be more different at the outset.
The deal to extend the Bush tax cuts alienated the president from many in his own party and made a lot of conservative Republicans unhappy, but nearly one-in-three voters don’t even know how their local congressman voted on the recent legislation.
While it’s a hot topic in Washington. D.C., only 33% of voters are Very Closely following recent news stories about the Census and congressional redistricting. That puts it way below the level of interest in the top stories of 2010.
In a year loaded with news, voters in 2010 paid most attention to stories about unemployment and job creation, the disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, the health care debate and the extension of the Bush tax cuts.
One-in-five voters now regularly get news and political updates on their phones or other portable electronic devices.
American voters believe free market competition will protect Internet users more than government regulation and fear that regulation will be used to push a political agenda.
The government still doesn't have it right when it comes to the economy, as far as most voters are concerned.
The Tea Party movement was one of the biggest political stories during the 2010 election season. From an electoral standpoint, the grassroots movement had it first impact by forcing long-time Senator Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party (and eventually out of the U.S. Senate). By the end of the season, several Tea Party candidates such as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Kentucky’s Rand Paul were elected to the U.S. Senate.
Most voters think the most important role for government is to protect their individual rights.
Though a sizable number of voters view the religious faith of political candidates as important, they don’t want their local religious leaders telling them who to vote for.
