Americans Place Even More Importance on a College Degree
While there’s disagreement over how to help students pay for it, Americans still overwhelmingly believe in the importance of a college degree to gaining employment.
While there’s disagreement over how to help students pay for it, Americans still overwhelmingly believe in the importance of a college degree to gaining employment.
"Events, dear boy, events," the late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan supposedly replied when asked what he most feared. And events can certainly make a difference, as was apparent this week: Prime Minister David Cameron moved out of No. 10 Downing Street and Theresa May moved in. This came after British voters, against Cameron's advice and contrary to widespread expectations, voted to leave the European Union June 23.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raised eyebrows and even drew fire from her friends at the New York Times for her recent public criticism of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Voters strongly agree that it’s bad for the high court when the justices make public political statements.
Our own sources in and around Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana have told us what everyone else has been reporting: He appears to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick. Still, to the best of their knowledge, the official call from Trump has not yet been made. We all know Trump is full of surprises, so we add this note of caution just in case. We all remember erroneous reports that John Kerry had selected Dick Gephardt as his running mate in 2004, when Kerry actually chose John Edwards. For our purposes here, we’ll assume it is true, that the GOP nominee for vice president will be Pence.
"Her mind is shot."
That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president.
Despite escalating tensions over police shootings that led to widespread protests and the killing of five police officers in Dallas last week, most voters continue to view crime in inner cities as a bigger problem than police discrimination against minorities. But blacks are far more likely to say they are treated unfairly by the police.
Just days before the Republican National Convention is expected to formally nominate him for president, Donald Trump has taken his largest lead yet over Hillary Clinton.
While Americans are facing a record level of college-related debt, support remains low for forgiving student loans or taking the further step of having the government pay for students who can't afford to go to college.
Democrats are a lot more enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton’s plan for so-called “free” college than other Americans are, but all agree that taxpayers will be the ones who pick up the tab.
Claims about racist cops from groups like Black Lives Matter lead more people to fear and hate the police.
There can be no dispute that Barack Obama was forced to wade through unprecedented bigotry in his speedy ascent to the most powerful perch in the world. His predecessor, George W. Bush, called it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
If Black Lives Matter, then why have entrenched members of the Congressional Black Caucus spent more time enriching themselves than taking care of their neglected constituents?
Americans strongly believe the media is emphasizing shootings by police officers involving black suspects over ones in which whites are shot and that that media coverage is prompting attacks on police.
In their influential 1970 book The Real Majority, political demographers Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg identified the individual they saw as the American “Middle Voter.” This person was a metropolitan “middle-aged, middle-income, middle-educated, Protestant, in a family whose working members work more likely with hands than abstractly with head.” They then drilled down a little deeper: “Middle Voter is a forty-seven-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.” Scammon and Wattenberg did not actually have a specific person in mind. Their description of Middle Voter was an archetype, but after the book was published, Wattenberg said, “I do not know for sure if the lady exists. But I suspect that if you looked hard enough, you’d find her.”
Democratic voters are far more confident than Republicans that their representatives in Congress will be an asset to their presidential nominee this November.
After the massacre of five Dallas cops, during a protest of police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, President Obama said, "America is not as divided as some have suggested."
When the Republican and Democratic national conventions gather in successive weeks in Cleveland and Philadelphia, respectively, one item on their plates will be reconsideration of their parties' nominating rules. Just about everyone agrees that they are unsatisfactory in some way or another, and many itch to do something about it.
There was never a more appropriately named book than "The War on Cops" by Heather Mac Donald, published a few weeks ago, on the eve of the greatest escalation of that war by the ambush murders of five policemen in Dallas.
While police killings are escalating in America, voters are less convinced that there is an actual war on those in blue, although most still blame politicians who are critical of the police for making their jobs more dangerous. But blacks and whites sharply disagree on both questions.
Twenty-six percent (26%) of Likely U.S. Voters think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey for the week ending July 7.