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 […]
Washington, D.C. Peter Berger, an eminent sociologist of religion and a lifelong Lutheran, asked himself several years ago: “Would my moral convictions change if I woke up tomorrow as an atheist?” For Berger, this perplexing question led to a research project involving fellow Judeo-Christian religious thinkers, which will culminate in the publication of two books, […]
The increasingly heated exchanges between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney helped make the race for the White House the top story last week in PEJ’s Index of the news. On the Democratic side, a former President generated a good chunk of the coverage, and it wasn’t all good. That, plus a football murder case.
Summary of Findings The 2008 presidential campaign began much earlier than usual, but public interest in the campaign is at most only modestly higher than in previous campaigns. While Democrats are following the campaign more closely than at the same stage in previous primary contests, Republicans are no more engaged than in the past, resulting […]
Summary of Findings Hillary Clinton continues to lead Barack Obama by a wide margin in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. But Obama has something Clinton doesn’t have — the support of Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey endorsed Obama in May of this year and recently held a fundraiser for him at her Malibu, Calif. home. […]
For years, journalists struggled to report on the activities the private security firms in Iraq, companies who functioned in some ways as private armies. But last week, when the story of one such company moved from the streets of Baghdad to the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, the media shed more light on the mystery.
Summary of Findings Sen. Hillary Clinton is by far the most popular presidential candidate among her own party’s voters, but has among the lowest overall favorable ratings of the leading candidates. In sharp contrast, the front-running Republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, evokes relatively modest enthusiasm from the GOP base, but is as broadly popular with all […]