Polls

Americans on the Final Four, Social Media, Boehner/McConnell, and More

| Tom Jensen

Americans don’t have particularly strong feelings about either the teams or the coaches playing in the Final Four this weekend. 46% have no opinion about Duke Basketball, 47% have no opinion about Kentucky Basketball, and 55% each have no opinion about Michigan State and Wisconsin Basketball. Those numbers compare to only 33-36% of voters who were ambivalent toward the teams in the Super Bowl this year- college basketball teams just can’t match the level of interest toward teams in the NFL.

Duke, Michigan State, and Wisconsin all have favorability ratings in the +13 to +15 range. Kentucky lags at only +4 with only 29% of voters having a positive opinion of its program to 25% with a negative one. Wisconsin at +15 (30/15) narrowly leads the field with Duke (+13 at 33/20) and Michigan State (also +13 at 29/16) just behind. None of the team’s coaches have even 50% name recognition. Mike Krzyzewski (+18 at 33/15) and Tom Izzo (also +18 at 29/11) are the most popular.

Most social media sites get pretty dim reviews from voters across the country. Here they are ranked from most popular to least popular:

Site/App

Net Favorability

Facebook

+9 (44/35)

Meerkat

Even (8/8)

Instagram

-1 (28/29)

Twitter

-8 (31/39)

Snapchat

-19 (16/35)

MySpace

-37 (11/48)

Facebook is the only site we polled on to get a positive favorability. In general we found that Democrats gave much higher marks to everything we tested than Republicans. For instance on this one Democrats (53/28) gave it a positive rating while Republicans (38/38) were evenly divided. Middle aged voters give Facebook positive marks while both seniors and younger voters give it more negative ones.

Meerkat already seems to be over and only 16% of voters even claim to have an opinion about it. Meerkats the animal have a pretty anonymous brand too, but they at least have a 15/7 favorability rating among voters who do have an opinion about them.

Instagram and Twitter are both seen positively by Democrats (36/22 and 42/30 respectively) and negatively by Republicans (16/38 and 20/46 respectively.) Instagram is popular with both age groups that we track under the age of 45, but unpopular with both age groups that we track over the age of 65.

Then there are Snapchat and MySpace, the ones almost no one likes. Snapchat only fares well with ‘very liberal’ (28/23) voters, African Americans (36/19), and voters under 30 (39/28). MySpace doesn’t poll positively with any group of the electorate.

Other notes from our national poll:

-Congress (11/78 approval), John Boehner (20/66 approval), and Mitch McConnell (20/56 approval) are all brutally unpopular. It’s a given that Boehner and McConnell are deeply unpopular with Democrats, but they also fare quite poorly with Republicans. The House Speaker has a 35/50 approval within his own party, and it’s 31/43 for the Senator Majority Leader. Both of them are even more unpopular with independents than they are with the overall electorate, with Boehner at 13/73 with them and McConnell at 16/61. 

-Americans have a more positive general attitude toward millionaires (34/23) than they do toward billionaires (31/28). Asked which group they have a higher opinion of, millionaires win out 29/16. Republicans (44/17 for millionaires and 42/18 for billionaires) have a much higher opinion of wealthy people than Democrats do (23/29 for millionaires and 22/36 for billionaires.)

-Finally Americans narrowly support statehood for Puerto Rico, 42/34. Democrats are pretty strongly in favor of it, 47/23. with Republicans narrowly opposed at 38/42.

Full results here

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