Last week we posted news of a poll on the heels of a hearing on the Hill where overturning Citizens United was discussed with relish. The poll was conducted jointly by the ostensibly non-partisan outlets the Washington Post and Pew. Today, we offer Brad Smith’s op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Examiner explaining the results of two polls conducted by CCP on the same subject. Smith offers his own analysis of just how informed the public is about what the Citizens United decision actually means and its long-term effects. In short: as is so often the case with polls, our house results show that the public, when actually made aware of the merits of the decision without media-driven “pump-priming”, has little aversion to the decision. Be sure to click the link and read the op-ed in its entirety. Here’s a snippet:

Past polling has shown immense public ignorance of campaign finance laws. In January 2012, my group, the Center for Competitive Politics, commissioned a poll that found 76 percent of respondents still did not know that “super PACs” must publicly disclose their donors.

We had also commissioned a poll of likely voters in 2010, just weeks after Citizens United was decided. We asked, “Are you aware of or have you followed the recent Citizens United case, related to corporate and union spending in elections, decided by the Supreme Court last month?” Only 22 percent answered yes, while 60 percent said no and 18 percent were unsure or refused to answer.

We then asked respondents about the actual issues in the case. When asked, “Do you believe that the government should have been able to prevent Citizens United, an incorporated nonprofit advocacy group, from airing ads promoting its movie?,” 51 percent of respondents agreed with the ruling and only 17 percent disagreed. When we asked, “Do you believe that the government should have been able to prevent Citizens United … from making its movie available through video-on-demand technology?” we got a nearly identical result.