Republicans probably shouldn’t be confused as the Education Party, based on the results of a new poll by Public Policy Polling.
Asked a string of extremely basic questions related to science and U.S. history, a majority of Republicans managed each time to pick the one that showed evidence of a lack of schooling.
Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents said they would support “establishing Christianity as the national religion,” while 30 percent said they would oppose it and 13 percent weren’t sure. The poll apparently did not inform the respondents that they had just chosen to directly violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly “prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion.”
The poll continued by asking respondents if they believe in global warming—to which 66 percent said they did not, while 25 percent said they do.
While it is still apparently an open question in conservative circles, the scientific community is now virtually unanimous in its vigorous advocacy for the veracity of global warming—and can point to many examples of its impact across the world.
Meanwhile, when asked whether they believe in evolution or not, just 37 percent of the respondents said they do while 49 percent said they do not. These were questions the nation was adjudicating nearly a century ago with the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s. But a majority of Republicans are not convinced, rejecting the science likely in an embrace of religious-based creation theories.
The poll’s primary purpose was to see where the leading Republican presidential candidates ranked in the minds of the public. This is how the candidates did: Scott Walker was the top pick for 25 percent of the respondents, 18 percent for Ben Carson, 17 percent for Jeb Bush, and 10 percent for Mike Huckabee. Rounding out the field of contenders are Chris Christie and Ted Cruz at 5 percent, Rand Paul at 4 percent, and Rick Perry and Marco Rubio at 3 percent.
The poll was conducted in late February with a sample of 316 Republican primary voters.
