Overview

As campaign advertisements funded by Super PACs dominate the airwaves in the lead-up to the South Carolina primaries this Saturday, 54% of registered voters say they have heard about the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allows corporations and individuals to spend as much money as they want on political advertising as long as it is not coordinated with candidate campaigns.

Fully 65% of those who are aware of the new rules on independent expenditures say they are having a negative effect on the 2012 presidential campaign. And among those who have heard a lot about these new campaign finance rules, 78% say the effect has been negative.

There is no substantial partisan divide in awareness and opinions of the new campaign spending rules. Roughly half of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike have heard about the court decision allowing unlimited independent expenditures. And among those who have heard about it, comparably wide majorities in each group say it is having a negative effect on the campaign this year.

Men are more likely than women to say they have heard at least a little about the Supreme Court decision and its effects, and awareness is also higher among college graduates. There is little difference in awareness across age or region of the country. Among those who have heard about the decision, majorities of all groups see the impact on the 2012 presidential campaign as negative.

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted January 11-16, 2012 among a national sample of 1,502 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (902 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 600 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 293 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see https://alpha.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/politics/methodology/

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and nativity and region to parameters from the March 2011 Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and population density to parameters from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status and relative usage of landline and cell phones (for those with both), based on extrapolations from the 2011 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size within the landline sample. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.