Americans Support Teaching Children about Global Warming

Americans overwhelmingly support teaching our children about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming – in all 50 states and 3,000+ counties across the nation, including Republican and Democratic strongholds. Despite this strong public support for climate education, there have been recent debates in several states about whether […] Read more »

Why Is Climate Change So Politically Polarizing?

One of the starkest displays of political polarization in the U.S. is on the subject of climate change. But it wasn’t always this way. Gallup’s tracking on the issue reveals periods in the 1990s when Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on the topic were not so different. So, how did the […] Read more »

No Missing Link: Knowledge Predicts Acceptance of Evolution in the United States

Americans have a fraught relationship with evolutionary theory. Despite widespread acceptance of this theory in the scientific community (Funk and Rainie 2015), public-opinion surveys have demonstrated that 38% of Americans identify as creationists (Swift 2017) and 52% disagree that human beings developed from earlier species of animals (National Science Board […] Read more »

17 striking findings from 2017

Pew Research Center studies a wide array of topics both in the U.S. and around the world, and every year we are struck by particular findings. Sometimes they mark a new milestone in public opinion; other times a sudden about-face. From an increase in Americans living without a spouse or […] Read more »

The Politics of Global Warming Beliefs

Seven in ten registered voters (72%) think global warming is happening. This includes nearly all liberal Democrats (97%; six percentage points higher than in our first survey in 2008), about nine in ten moderate/conservative Democrats (89%; eight points higher than in 2008), and a majority of liberal/moderate Republicans (63%). In […] Read more »