Voters Are Gung-Ho for Use of Drones But Not Over the United States
Monday, February 13, 2012
Voters strongly approve of President Obama's decision to use unmanned drones to go after terrorists, but they're much less excited about the use of such aircraft for surveillance on the home front.
The president recently acknowledged that the United States has a secret drone program for killing al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, and the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just nine percent (9%) of Likely U.S. Voters oppose such a program. Seventy-six percent (76%) approve of the use of the unmanned aircraft to kill terrorists. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here .)
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on February 10-11, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC . See methodology .