Skip to content
Member Login
Politics and Government

What Do Americans Know about the GOP Presidential Candidates?

<p>Mitt Romney is shown on television monitors in the filing center during the Republican presidential debate at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. (Danny Moloshok/courtesy Reuters)</p>
Mitt Romney is shown on television monitors in the filing center during the Republican presidential debate at Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. (Danny Moloshok/courtesy Reuters)

By experts and staff

Published

Experts

In yesterday’s Friday File I flagged a CBS/Vanity Fair poll that showed that most Americans do not know that Mitt Romney’s first name is Willard—as opposed to Mitt (or Mittens or Gromit). That’s a cute poll result that added a bit of levity to my weekly news roundup. But to judge by another poll, this one by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, there’s a lot else that the public doesn’t know about the Republican candidates even though they are dominating the stories on all the cable news channels:

Not surprisingly, older Americans (50-64), college graduates, and Republicans were the most likely to supply the right answers.

The lesson for political junkies is that while they may obsess about which candidates are making which media buys in which South Carolina counties, most Americans haven’t even begun to think about the 2012 presidential election. And they probably won’t until late this summer—if then.