If it's in the News, it's in our Polls. Public opinion polling since 2003.

POLITICS

Conservative Viewers Are Better Informed About Important Topics

How big is the U.S. national debt? How many Americans don’t have health insurance? What’s the top tax rate? If you watch liberal news media, you’re more likely to get those answers wrong.

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that only 16% of Likely U.S. Voters who say CNN is their favorite cable news outlet and 20% of those who say MSNBC is their favorite correctly estimated the U.S. national debt (currently more than $28 trillion) as being between $20 trillion and $30 trillion. By contrast, 35% of Fox News viewers, and 32% who say they get their news from talk radio, correctly estimated the size of the U.S. national debt. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

(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 2,000 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on April 29-May 3, 2021 by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 2 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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