By: MJ Lee - March 22, 2012
By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, a majority of Americans think the government should approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, according to a new Gallup poll Thursday.
More than half of the adults polled, 57 percent, believe the government should give the green light on the politically divisive project, while 29 percent think it shouldn’t. Fourteen percent said they had no opinion.
Support for the Canada-to-Texas pipeline is significantly higher among Republicans than Democrats — 81 percent of GOP-ers said the government should approve building it, compared with just 51 percent of independents and 44 percent of Democrats who said the same.
Americans in the Midwest and Southern regions of the country, where the proposed pipeline would travel through, were the most likely to think positively of building the pipeline — 68 percent of Midwesterners and 61 percent ofSoutherners — while 52 percent of Americans on the West Coast and 48 percent on the East Coast gave the thumbs-up.
Even though the issue has been front and center in Washington, the poll found that half of Americans are not paying much attention to news about the pipeline. One in four said they are “not at all” following news about Keystone, while another one in four said they are “not too closely” tuning into the topic. Just one out of five said they are following the news “very closely.”
The findings of the survey come as President Barack Obama is set to visit Cushing, Okla., on Thursday as part of an energy tour this week to announce that he is issuing a memorandum to expedite a portion of the pipeline.
The Gallup poll was conducted March 8-11 among 1,024 adults, and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
see Gallup poll
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