How many Americans are aware of anonymous campaign spending?
I’ve been covering anonymous campaign spending and concerns about the possibility of voter fraud or vote suppression in the lead-up to the midterm elections for quite some time, but what percentage of Americans have been listening? It turns out the number, according to a new Pew Research Center Poll, is somewhere in between the percentage aware of California’s marijuana legalization proposition and those that knew about Jon Stewart’s rally in DC:

Overall, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and Democrats to talk up the pernicious effects of anonymous spending on campaigns, it only seems to have registered for about a quarter of the population, while concerns about voter fraud or vote suppression only caught the attention of about one in five Americans. There’s also a slight partisan trend picked up by the Pew Survey in awareness of both topics — Democrats were slightly more aware of the anonymous spending issue, while Republicans were a good deal more tuned into reports of voter fraud or suppression. This follows naturally from the stated concerns of both parties; a part of me expected that partisan divide to be even bigger.