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That – not settlements or Jerusalem – is Palestinians’ top priority, a new poll shows. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a stunning new Palestinian opinion poll last week. The headline finding was that 60% of all Palestinians, including majorities in both the West Bank and Gaza, now openly say their goal isn’t a two-state solution, but “reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea” – aka eradicating Israel. Yet that isn’t actually news for anyone who’s been paying attention: A 2011 poll, for instance, found that even among ostensible supporters of two states, 66%...

Poll after poll shows President Obama’s approval rating dipping recently, and one new Quinnipiac University Poll finds that voters say Mitt Romney would have been a better choice in 2012. With Mr. Obama deploying military troops to Iraq, failing to find compromise with Congress and seeing major defeats in the Supreme Court, voters continue to sour on him. Quinnipiac found 45 percent of voters say the country would have been better off if Mr. Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, had been election, while just 38 percent say Mr. Obama remains a better choice. Even Democrats aren’t so sure — just...

President Obama is the worst president since World War II, according to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. The poll finds that 33 percent of voters say Obama is the worst since the war, with George W. Bush trailing in second place at 28 percent. The only other president in double digits, at 13 percent, is Richard Nixon, who resigned from office after the Watergate scandal. The results raise the possibility that voters are choosing the presidents who are freshest in their memory. Or they could just think that this century has produced historically bad presidents. Obama ran in 2008 as...

ESPN has been hyping the World Cup for weeks, showing video from venues across the country where large crowds have gathered to watch the US play. But it's a mirage. Only about 17% of Americans are showing interest in the World Cup soccer matches as opposed to 12% who are following the IRS lost emails story and 26% following events in Iraq. Pew Research: So far, the growing crisis in Iraq has not drawn strong interest from the American public. As Sunni militants extend their control of large swaths of Iraq, 25% say they are paying very close attention to...

There was time when a majority of Americans were confident in their Supreme Court, but those positive feelings have been eroding in the last quarter of a century so that just 30% now say they have confidence in the institution, according to a Gallup poll. The poll, released Monday, had good news and bad news for the high court, a unique institution that serves as a check and balance in the United States. People have more confidence in the court than in any other arm of government, but that may not be saying that much when confidence in the presidency...

Americans' confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen, reaching record lows for the Supreme Court (30%) and Congress (7%), and a six-year low for the presidency (29%). The presidency had the largest drop of the three branches this year, down seven percentage points from its previous rating of 36%.

A new Gallup survey finds that Americans’ confidence in all three branches of the U.S. government has fallen dramatically, reaching record lows for Congress (7 percent), the Supreme Court (30 percent), and a six-year low for the presidency (29 percent). Survey results were based on telephone interviews conducted June 5-8, with a random sample of 1,027 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. The presidency, currently with Barack Obama in power, has experienced the largest...

Fifty-five percent of Americans say that Hillary Clinton can relate to and understand the problems of average citizens as well as other presidential candidates can, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll. By comparison, 37 percent of respondents disagreed, saying she can’t relate as well as other candidates can. These numbers come after Hillary Clinton declared that she and her husband were “dead broke” after leaving the White House in 2001.

A new survey from Gallup finds 41 percent want immigration to the United States to decrease. The Gallup poll released Friday found a 6-percentage-point spike in the number of people who want immigration to fall since last year. Gallop asked people about immigration, not illegal immigration. Thirty-three percent of people think immigration levels are fine at the present level, while 22 percent say those levels should be increased. While only 22 percent support increased immigration, that number has been trending up over the past 15 years. In 1999, even more people wanted to see immigration rates fall and only 10...

Minbcnews.com is running a poll about a proposal in Michigan to make obtaining a concealed carry permit cheaper, faster and easier in the state.  The proposal would eliminate the nearly 100 year old county gun boards, which at present have little to do.   Under the proposal background checks would be run by the State Police instead of county boards.  The 83 County gun boards, which have been accused of delaying permits, would be eliminated. The bill has passed the Senate.   It would have to pass the House and be signed by the Governor to become law. The current question...

With the rest of the bad news this week, we’ve missed its impact on the electorate to some extent. Two new national polls this week show Barack Obama’s approval rating sliding back toward historic lows, and the economic news this week might make it even more difficult to reverse the trend. Yesterday, Gallup reported that Obama’s weekly approval rating had skidded to its lowest point in a quarter, coming close to a personal low for his presidency: The situation in Iraq seems to be taking a toll on President Barack Obama’s public standing. His weekly job approval rating is...

There is a poll on the front page of the Portland Press Herald website that needs to be freeped. Should Gov. LePage withhold all General Assistance funding for communities that ignore his administration's policy prohibiting undocumented immigrants from receiving state aid? Related article: June 24, 2014 From LePage, new threat on local aid to ‘illegals’ The governor says all General Assistance payments will be cut off for communities that help asylum seekers and other undocumented immigrants. By Kevin Miller Staff Writer Gov. Paul LePage is threatening to withhold all state funding for General Assistance from communities that ignore his administration’s...

The consensus is: it’s no accident. More than three-quarters of voters -- 76 percent -- think the emails missing from the account of Lois Lerner, the ex-IRS official at the center of the scandal over targeting of conservative groups, were deliberately destroyed. That’s according to a new Fox News poll. That suspicion is shared across party lines, albeit to varying degrees. An overwhelming 90 percent of Republicans think the emails were intentionally destroyed, as do 74 percent of independents and 63 percent of Democrats. Overall, just 12 percent of voters believe the emails were destroyed accidentally. Another 12 percent are...

More Americans disapprove than approve of Barack Obama’s response to the situation in Iraq, even while the public broadly agrees with his decision not to send U.S. combat forces there. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll marks the difficulties Obama faces in crafting a popular response to the deepening crisis. Two-thirds oppose sending ground troops to fight the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, a step the president himself ruled out last week. Regardless, just 42 percent approve of the way he’s handling the situation, while 52 percent disapprove. The public divides evenly on another potential option, the use of air strikes.

In its latest poll on confidence in U.S. institutions, Gallup reports that Americans’ faith in the three major news media platforms—television news, newspapers, and news on the Internet—is at or tied with record lows, and that trust in Internet or online news topped television news for the first time. The number of Americans who have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers has dropped from its 1979 peak of 51% to 22%, while their confidence in television news has fallen from a high of 46% in 1993 to just 18% today. Online news finished slightly ahead of...

You already know how the national polling looks, but those numbers include the opinions of many Americans whose votes will have zero impact on the much-watched battle for control of the Senate. NPR clears out New Yorkers, Californians and Texans (among others) from its sample, focusing instead on the following 12 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and West Virginia. A look at the results, bearing in mind that presidential approval rating has historically been the single most significant variable in midterm election cycles: That would be (38/58) overall, including an...

The sixth-year blues have caught up to Barack Obama … with a vengeance. In an NBC/WSJ poll taken before the meltdown in Iraq, Obama gets his lowest marks ever on foreign policy, where his claim to “smart power” has evidently reached its expiration date. But the real danger to Obama and to Democrats vying for office in less than five months is the vote of no confidence in Obama’s leadership: The percentage of Americans approving of President Barack Obama’s handling of foreign policy issues has dropped to the lowest level of his presidency as he faces multiple overseas challenges,...

Forty-two percent of respondents picked Clinton -- whose wife could very well run for the White House in 2016 -- as the president they admired the most. He was followed by current President Barack Obama at 18 percent, George W. Bush at 17 percent and his father, George H.W. Bush, at 16 percent. The NBC/WSJ/Annenberg Survey was conducted June 2-8 of 1,031 registered voters. The survey's margin of error is plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

...take our poll and let us know if you think Oregon should pass a bill to make it a crime to endanger a minor by allowing access to guns.

Call this a capper to Hillary Clinton’s terrible, no-good, very bad week. A new Bloomberg poll shows that America is so excited about the prospect of a Hillary candidacy in 2016 that her approval figure has dropped 18 points in as many months, from a peak of 70% when she left the State Department to just 52% now. This cannot be what Team Hillary had in mind a week ago, as she prepared her national rollout of Hard Choices and instead demonstrated that she still has no answers for her record or her ambitions: Hillary Clinton’s popularity continues to...