Americans of all partisan stripes support slicing federal spending but there is widespread opposition to the idea of imposing similar cuts to the military budget, the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday showed.
According to the poll, 61 percent of American adults — including 57 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans — are in favor of a five percent, across-the-board cut to overall government spending. Only 33 percent are opposed to said cuts.
But there is near identical opposition to an eight percent across-the-board cut to military spending: 60 percent said they are opposed, while only 34 percent said they are in favor of such defense cuts. A huge majority of 73 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of independents said they are opposed to those military cuts.
Democrats, on the other hand, are almost evenly split on the idea. Forty-seven percent of Democrats said they would support an eight percent cut to military spending, while 48 percent said they would be opposed.
The poll was conducted Feb. 27-March 3 using live phone interviews with 1,017 adults nationwide. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
