American Accuracy

What kinds of political knowledge questions are Americans best at? I was messing with a 2012 national data set that includes several such questions so I decided to run a quick-and-not-at-all-clean analysis to see which questions respondents performed the best on, which they sucked at.

	% Correct
Terms Prez Can Serve	90.2
Who is VP	85.1
Size of Defense Budget	83.2
What is Medicare	78.3
Who Controls House	74.5
Mitt Romney’s Religion	68.4
Who Controls Senate	66.8
Who is Speaker of House	40.0
Barack Obama’s Religion	37.9
Length of Senate Term	35.8
Spending Comparison	33.3
Who is Chief Justice	32.7
Who is Prime Minster UK	19.1

Lots of folks know the president can serve up to two terms, or the name of the vice president. Far fewer know the names of the chief justice or the prime minster of the U.K. No surprise there. And Obama's religion scores rather low because of the various theories that he's secretly Muslim.