Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
There has been a modest improvement in the public’s ratings of current economic conditions – while just 15% say the nation’s economy is in excellent or good shape, the percentage saying the economy is in poor shape has dipped to 35%, the lowest percentage since January 2008. Yet the public’s future economic outlook has become […]
Overview Barack Obama has edged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final days of the presidential campaign. In the Pew Research Center’s election weekend survey, Obama holds a 48% to 45% lead over Romney among likely voters. The survey finds that Obama maintains his modest lead when the probable decisions of undecided voters are taken […]
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. […]
The public’s news interests were very much focused on domestic developments this year, with the election outcome, last week’s horrific school shooting and Hurricane Sandy leading the list of the top stories of 2012. With the exception of the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya in September, which became a bitterly debated campaign issue, […]
By Andrew Kohut, Pew Research Center President November 14, 2012 Postelection talk of “lessons learned” is often exaggerated and misleading, and so it is in 2012. A week after President Obama won re-election, two themes are dominant. First, that Mr. Obama kept his job because key elements of his base—notably young people, African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans—turned […]
Pew Research’s fourth major report on global restrictions on religion finds that the share of countries with high or very high restrictions on religion rose from 37% in 2010 to 40% in 2011. The Middle East and North Africa continued to have the highest levels of restrictions in the year when much of the Arab Spring uprisings occurred, with social hostilities involving religion increasing markedly and government restrictions remaining high.
But even as the tone of Obama’s overall coverage was better than his opponent’s, much has changed in four years as the candidate of hope and change became an incumbent presiding over a sluggish economy. The media’s coverage of the late stages of Obama’s 2012 campaign was considerably less flattering than it was in 2008 […]
Overview Voters had a mixed reaction to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in the hours immediately following Barack Obama’s victory. Reflecting the narrow vote margin between the candidates, 44% of voters overall said they were happy with the outcome, while 43% said they were unhappy, according to a Pew Research Center report based […]