Public Opinion

The pundits seem to agree: George W. Bush is toast, kaput. So how come the president’s holding steady, even rising, in the polls? And what does that mean for 2008?

Let’s consider the weight of the punditical pile-on: Joe Klein, writing in Time magazine, sees "An Epic Collapse" -- specifically, the Iraq war, the Walter Reed hospital mess, the flap over the fired U.S. attorneys. Concludes Klein: "It is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of… more

From the outset, Kendall Myers appeared determined to explode what he described as the “myth” of the special relationship between Britain and the United States. It had never existed, he said in his opening remarks, “or, at least, not one that we noticed”.

Instead, relations had been “altogether too one-sided” for a very long time. “The poodle factor did not begin with Tony Blair, it began, yes, with Winston Churchill.”

At this point Dr Myers acknowledged that “as an employee… more

America’s image has been steadily deteriorating over the past five years, with a slight recovery in some countries in 2005. Yet overwhelmingly, anti-Americanism is on the rise. Why is this so? Pew pollster Andrew Kohut and journalist Bruce Stokes use surveys from more than 91,000 people in 50 countries to explore this deeply unsettling finding in their recently released book, America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked.

Kohut and Stokes argue that… more

You wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Andrew Kohut, a pollster and commentator who seems to divide his time between quantifying America's Bush-era plunge in the world's esteem and quantifying Bush's plunge in America's esteem. Then again, you also wouldn't expect to find good news for President Bush in a book by Julia E. Sweig, a liberal senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But Sweig's Friendly Fire joins Kohut's America Against… more

Is it time to place the two major political parties on California's endangered species list? If current trends persist, the number of independent voters may outnumber Democrats and Republicans by 2025.

Distrust of elected leaders and faltering confidence in the political establishment have increasingly driven Californians to the no-party label. New voters appear to be moving to the independent status so fast that we need to rethink the red and blue political map in the 2006 California election.

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On Wednesday March 15, 2006, the New America Foundation hosted a forum about where American and Iraqi public opinion on the war stands three years after hostilities began, and how it's changing. Co-chaired by Steven Kull, the principal investigator of a survey conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), and Anatol Lieven, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation, and moderated by Jerry Irvine, New America's Director of Communications, the panel served to announce PIPA's findings and… more