For some voters Ignorance is bliss

Even as the 2008 presidential campaign draws increasing news coverage, the public shows limited awareness of the personal backgrounds of some of the top GOP candidates.

While 86% of the public is able to name Rudy Giuliani as the former mayor of New York City, only about half as many - 42% of the public - correctly identified Mitt Romney as a Mormon and even fewer (35%) knew that Romney was the former governor of Massachusetts.

Romney's speech on religion and politics, scheduled for Dec. 6, is widely seen as an effort to assuage concerns that some religious conservatives in the GOP have raised about his Mormon faith. Among Republicans, 60% could name Romney as the Republican candidate who is Mormon, but 40% could not.

Mike Huckabee, whose support is surging in key primary states as well as in national polls, is still something of a mystery to the public. Only about a quarter of Americans (26%) - and just 36% of Republicans - correctly named Huckabee as a former Arkansas governor. Smaller percentages are aware that Huckabee is a former Baptist minister (21% of the public, 28% of Republicans).

There is greater public awareness of John McCain's experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and Fred Thompson's background as a TV and movie actor. Overall, 56% of the public named McCain as a former POW while 47% correctly identified Thompson as a former actor.


More Americans say they feel like they know a lot about Giuliani and McCain than the other leading Republican candidates. Even so, fewer than three-in-ten say they know a lot about Giuliani (28%) and McCain (27%). Just 16% say they know a lot about Romney, while 11% say they know a lot about Huckabee. More than four-in-ten Americans (42%) say they know "nothing at all" about the former Arkansas governor.

As expected, the GOP candidates are better known by Republicans than by Democrats or independents: 39% of Republicans know a lot about Giuliani and 38% know a lot about McCain. However, even among Republicans, only 29% say they know a lot about Romney. Fewer than one-in-five Republicans know a lot about Thompson and Huckabee, with 39% saying they know nothing at all about Huckabee.

These findings are based on the most recent installment of the weekly News Interest Index, an ongoing project of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. The index, building on the Center's longstanding research into public attentiveness to major news stories, examines news interest as it relates to the news media's agenda. The weekly survey is conducted in conjunction with The Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index, which monitors the news reported by major newspaper, television, radio and online news outlets on an ongoing basis. In the most recent week, data relating to news coverage was collected from November 25-30 and survey data measuring public interest in the top news stories of the week was collected November 30 - December 3 from a nationally representative sample of 1,005 adults.
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=376