Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Introduction and Summary A year before the 2008 presidential election, most major national opinion trends decidedly favor the Democrats. Discontent with the state of the nation is markedly greater than it was four years ago. President Bush’s approval rating has fallen from 50% to 30% over this period. And the Democrats’ advantage over the Republicans [...]
Summary of Findings With battle lines drawn over legislation funding the Iraq war, the public is showing little appetite for compromise. Overall, a solid majority of Americans (59%) continue to say they want their representative to support a bill calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq by August 2008, while just a third want [...]
The Republican Party has traditionally garnered it strongest backing from wealthier voters. But the recent overall decline in Republican party affiliation nationwide has even taken a toll on GOP support among affluent voters. The latest Pew surveys find partisan parity among registered voters with annual family incomes in excess of roughly $135,000 per annum. Read [...]
Summary of Findings Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway. At the same time, many of the key trends that nurtured the [...]
A sweeping election tends to invite sweeping conclusions — and the Democrats’ takeover of both houses of Congress this November provides a tempting array of opportunities for exaggeration or misinterpretation. With that in mind, let’s look at the major lessons to be gleaned from the exit polls and opinion polls about how America voted this [...]
Summary of Findings A nationwide Pew Research Center survey finds voting intentions shifting in the direction of Republican congressional candidates in the final days of the 2006 midterm campaign. The new survey finds a growing percentage of likely voters saying they will vote for GOP candidates. However, the Democrats still hold a 48% to 40% [...]
White evangelical Protestants have become one of the most important parts of the Republican Party’s electoral base, making up over one-third of those who identify with the GOP and vote for its candidates. The party’s political fortunes depend, in large part, on retaining the solid support of the evangelical community. But evangelicals, like other voters, [...]
Summary of Findings Turnout in the 2006 midterm election may well be higher than normal, given the level of interest expressed by voters. Today, 51% of voters say they have given a lot of thought to this November’s election, up from 45% at this point in 2002 and 42% in early October of 1998. Even [...]
The percent of Democratic voters who think of themselves as “liberals” has been slowly rising in recent years, while the number of conservative Democrats has declined. In polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press from January to September of 2006, 32% of Democrats describe themselves as ideologically liberal, while [...]
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Republican Party made sharp gains in party affiliation nationally, nearly wiping out the Democrats’ long-standing advantage. However, the Republican increases have faded and the Democratic Party now holds a slim edge in overall partisanship among registered voters. The modest Democratic recovery has been mostly concentrated in the blue [...]
What’s the new generation coming to? Are today’s young people apathetic and politically inert, as the stereotypes suggest? Are they more reluctant to get involved in politics and public life than generations past? What will American politics be like when they are eventually in charge? The answers are not what you might think. Not only [...]
Many Americans do not fit well within into either the conservative or liberal camps. Instead they find a home in one of two other U.S. political traditions, libertarian and populist, or defy attempts to pigeon-hole them. Read full article at pewresearch.org
Last week’s historic split in the House of Labor was driven, at least in part, by disagreements over whether the AFL-CIO should be focusing more on union organizing drives or electoral politics. Much is at stake, not just for the union movement but also for the political parties. Working class voters are a key swing [...]
Introduction Although former Vermont governor Howard Dean failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination, his campaign left a strong imprint on the political world. It assembled a network of over a half-million active supporters and contributors, raised over $20 million in mostly small donations online, and demonstrated the power of the internet as a networking [...]
Summary of Findings This report is an excerpt from chapter one of the book Trends 2005, produced by the Pew Research Center. Public attitudes on national security are now much more strongly associated with partisan affiliation than they were in the late 1990s. A comprehensive study of long-term public values finds that beliefs about national [...]
During every presidential election, questions arise over the results of political polls and how those surveys are conducted. This year’s hot topic is the partisan composition of the leading national polls. Politicians and pundits alike now scrutinize a survey sample’s partisan split as closely as the horse-race results. Surveys that are deemed to have “too [...]
Summary of Findings As the Republicans gather in New York to nominate George W. Bush for a second term, more Americans see the Republican Party than the Democratic Party as friendly toward religion. And most express comfort with President Bush’s reliance on his religious beliefs in making policy decisions. On the issue of gay marriage, [...]
The Democratic Party has achieved a small gain in party affiliation and holds a 33%-29% edge over the GOP in Pew surveys conducted in 2004. This represents a modest shift from the two year period following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when the Republican Party had drawn virtually even with the Democrats. The current [...]
Southern Democrats More Culturally Conservative, Not So Different Otherwise
Over the past four years, the American electorate has been dealt a series of body blows, each capable of altering the political landscape. The voting system broke down in a presidential election. A booming economy faltered, punctuated by revelations of one of the worst business scandals in U.S. history. And the country endured a [...]
Survey Findings A year after Democrats took control of the Senate, the party’s rank-and-file give Democratic congressional leaders lower marks for performance than GOP adherents give their leadership. While 64% of Democrats approve of their leaders’ job performance, 80% of Republicans have a positive view of the job GOP leaders are doing. Consequently, the Democratic [...]
With all eyes now firmly focused on a general election match-up between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the big question is which way independents will go — particularly those independents who have been supporting John McCain. While McCain’s popularity has focused more attention on this crucial bloc, independents are the swing voters in every [...]
Foreword and Overview Foreword In 1987, we embarked on an ambitious project to better understand the nature of American politics. We identified a broad range of beliefs and values that underlie common political labels and that ultimately drive political action. A voter typology emerged from this effort which classifies the electorate into distinct groupings, defined [...]
Introduction This report consists of Tables only. Tables Party Identification by Subgroups* (Percentaged Horizontally) Total Total Number of Republican Democrat Independent Republican Democrat Interviews % % % % % Total 30 31 39=100 46 46 (9652) Sex Male 31 26 43=100 50 41 (4780) Female 28 37 35=100 41 50 (4872) Race White 33 28 [...]
Analysis Breakdowns An analysis of recent Pew Research Center surveys Republicans… Who They Are Despite its resurgence over the past 20 years, the Republican Party has never been numerically superior to the Democratic Party. For most of the 1990′s, the two have been essentially equal in this respect. In our most recent surveys, the Center [...]
Report Summary The GOP is riding high with the public in the after-glow of its big election victory. Most Americans (57%) are happy the Republicans won, approve of their plans and policies for the future (52%), and think party leaders will be successful in getting things done in Washington (62%).
Report Summary Reflecting a dramatically changed environment in America and the world, the voter typology which Times Mirror created in 1987 has been modified to make it more responsive to the new values and attitudes that affect voter behavior in 1994. We present it as “The People, The Press and Politics: The New Political Landscape.” [...]
Report Summary On the eve of the national political conventions the American electorate is composed of three generations that are likely to play vastly different roles in the coming election. Americans over 50 may be the first generation of older people in modern history to spearhead a political revolution, and middle-aged people, clustered in the [...]
Report Summary The military victory in the Gulf has positioned Republicans to establish the GOP as the dominant national political party. The latest nationwide survey by the Times Mirror Center For The People & The Press finds more Americans calling themselves Republicans than Democrats and shows the GOP with a 10 percentage point lead in [...]
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About Pew Research Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
