Public Opinion
An October 2010 Bloomberg poll found that 47 percent of Americans say they would be less likely to support a political candidate if his campaign was supported by advertising paid for by anonymous business groups. 41 percent said that it would not matter, and 9 percent said they would be more likely to back the candidate.
A February 2010 poll from the Pew Research Center found that 68 percent of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision to allow corporations to make expenditures on behalf of candidates during elections. 17 percent approve of the expenditures, and 15 percent of respondents said they were unsure.
Read more about this topic: 527 Organization
Famous quotes related to public opinion:
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)