The percentage of Americans naming race relations or racism as the most important problem facing the country increased to 9% this month, up from 3% in June. Mentions of race relations as a top problem have risen and fallen multiple times over the past seven months as racially charged events […] Read more »
2015 State of the First Amendment Survey
The State of the First Amendment survey, conducted each year since 1997 by the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center, tests Americans’ knowledge of their core freedoms and samples their opinions on First Amendment issues of the day. The 2015 survey questions covered topics including the use of Confederate flags on […] Read more »
Republican Areas of Country Getting More Conservative
Poll numbers show that while the nation has grown more politically “liberal” overall since 2008, as we noted here recently, some places with strong Republican voting tendencies have moved in the opposite direction, becoming more “conservative.” … The growing divides highlight the challenge Republican candidates may have in winning swing […] Read more »
The Kaleidoscope Society
The Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, President Obama’s wrenching eulogy in Charleston, and a Census Bureau report that kids of color for the first time now make up a majority of America’s under-5 population all arrived within one indelible 24-hour period late last week. Each event sent the same […] Read more »
A Tale of Two Supreme Court Decisions
The two major decisions recently handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court have very direct relationships to public opinion. One of the decisions fits well with majority public opinion. The other, in a broad sense, does not. The first corresponds to public opinion that has shifted significantly over the past […] Read more »
Americans, Politics and Science Issues
One of the key trends in public opinion over the past few decades has been a growing divide among Republicans and Democrats into ideologically uniform “silos.” A larger share of the American public expresses issue positions that are either consistently liberal or conservative today than did so two decades ago, […] Read more »