Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
As has been the case throughout the past year, Barack Obama maintains a sizeable favorability advantage over Mitt Romney. Currently, 55% of registered voters express a favorable opinion of Obama, just 45% say the same of his challenger. Voter impressions of Romney have improved substantially over the past six months. In March – during the […]
Overview Proposals to require voters to show photo identification before being allowed to vote draw overwhelming support. By 77% to 20%, voters favor a requirement that those voting be required to show photo ID. Opinion about this is little changed from six years ago, when 80% of voters supported voter photo ID requirements. Several states […]
Election Day 2012 was one of the busiest ever in the world of social media. Twitter reported that the election was the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history. There were more than 31 million tweets sent, with a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute shortly after the television networks called the race for Obama. […]
Introduction There is considerable interest in the role that social networking sites (SNS) are playing in politics and campaigns. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and scores of state and local candidates and countless advocacy groups are using Facebook pages and other social media tools to try to engage voters this year. At the same […]
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.
Heading into the third and final presidential election debate, few Americans believe that international concerns are among the most important problems facing the country. However, the public has definite views on international issues. And there are some sharp differences between Republicans and Democrats.
The way the candidates’ character and biography are portrayed was largely consistent across different media sectors, but there were some striking exceptions-and those came from cable news and radio talk. To a great extent, moreover, these ideological media are playing offense rather than defense-that is, spending considerably more time attacking the candidate they oppose than […]
Social Media and Political Engagement Engagement through social networking sites and Twitter has become a marked feature of political and civic life for a significant portion of Americans. Previous work by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life has documented the key role that the internet and social media play in people’s participation in […]