Sociological Images

If you’re paying any attention to the U.S. presidential election, you’ve likely heard a lot about campaign spending on ads. So how much is being spent? And where?

Dmitriy T.C. sent in an interactive graphic that the Washington Post created that allows you to look at one particular type of campaign spending: commercials in various television markets. Spending, and thus exposure to presidential campaign commercials, is very unevenly distributed. Many states get almost no attention from the national campaigns and the interest groups and PACS that support them, since their voting outcomes are seen as all but inevitable.

I, on the other hand, live in the largest city in a swing state; $37 million has been spent on over 47,000 commercials here:

Here’s the key for the map; the darkest green shade indicates more than 20,000 ads, a number roughly equal to how many times I have been called by political pollsters during the past three months:

You can also limit the map to look just at Democratic or Republican spending.

Florida leads the nation in amount spent on TV ads by the two campaigns. The Republicans have outspent the Democrats in all of the top 11 states except New Hampshire:

The site also has a graph that lets you track spending in the most competitive states by week between mid-April and  now.

This is just one element of campaign spending. Add in the cost of all the mailers, campaign trips, online ads, the conventions themselves, and Get out the Vote efforts by the presidential campaigns or interest groups and SuperPACs associated with them, and the amount spent to elect our president is truly mind-boggling.

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

Last Thursday, Republican Representative and Tea Party favorite, Joe Walsh (R-Ill), told reporters that when it comes to abortion, “there’s no such exception as life of the mother” because of “advances in science and technology.” This astounding claim was news to the medical community.

Walsh joins the ranks of some other prominent Republican men who don’t understand basic lady parts science: Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), who claimed that pregnancy from “legitimate rape” is “really rare” because “the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down,” and conservative comedian Rush Limbaugh, who doesn’t understand the basics of birth control pills. (He thinks you take a pill every time you have sex!)

These remarks would be humorous if it weren’t for the fact that these men are part of a broader effort by the extreme wing of the Republican Party to take aim at women’s reproductive health.

At the state level, Republican lawmakers enacted a record number of anti-abortion measures in 2011, four times as many as the previous year. A study from the Guttmacher Institute shows that legislators in 45 state capitals introduced 944 provisions to limit women’s reproductive health and rights in the first three months of 2012. These states are proposing/passing abortion ultrasound requirements, gestational limits, health insurance exemptions for contraception coverage, and stringent limitations on medical abortions.

In the past two years, 19 states have introduced bills modeled on a Nebraska law that bans abortion 20 weeks after fertilization. The Oklahoma State Senate redefined “person” as starting at conception, while the Mississippi House approved a bill requiring women who want an abortion to undergo an examination to determine if there is a fetal heartbeat. Texas and Virginia require women to undergo an ultrasound prior to receiving an abortion, and many other states have similar proposals underway. Texas recently cut reproductive services for 130,000 poor women.  As this chart from NARAL indicates, twice as many states passed anti-choice laws in 2011 than in 2010.

 

We’re in the home stretch of the presidential election here in the U.S. Many of us now live in states that allow early voting or mail-in absentee voting, but Tuesday, November 6th, is officially Election Day.

But why Tuesday? It doesn’t seem like the most obvious or convenient day to go to the polls; Saturday might seem like a better candidate.

In this short talk, Jacob Soboroff explains the history of why we vote on Tuesdays: in 1845, Congress passed a law setting an official voting day, and didn’t want people to have to travel on Sundays or miss Wednesday market days and so on and so forth, and eventually they settled on Tuesday as the best day to accommodate the travel times required to get places in horse-drawn buggies so people could vote with the minimum disruption to their lives.

And so we still vote on Tuesdays more than a century and a half later, even though, as Selena Simmons-Duffin of NPR pointed out in a story this morning, a lot of critics argue that it reduces voter turnout due to the difficulty of getting off of work to go vote in states that don’t allow any type of early voting.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Are people’s first names a clue as to which party they support? Chris Wilson at Yahoo  created this nifty interactive graphic from information on contributors of $200 or more. Mouse over a name-circle to see the proportion of Democratic and Republican donors. Or enter a name in the search box. For example, 60% of the 3,000 Scotts gave to Republicans.

The most obvious difference is that women (or at least people with women’s names) are all to the Democratic side of the of midpoint. Men are mostly Republican, though several fall to the left of the midpoint. Bob is the farthest left — 61-39 Democrat — though Robert breaks Republican (55-45). Jim and James follow the same pattern, with the 57-43 split going from Democrat to Republican as you go from informal to formal.

Among the women, Ellen is the most partisan Democrat (81-19), Ashley the least (52-48). If you change the view from numbers of people to amounts donated, the whole chart shifts to the right. Republicans pony up more money. Or to put it another way, the political big spenders break Republican (despite what Foxies like Tucker Carlson claim).

Among the women, Ashley, Heather, Tiffany, and Betty all lean to the right on the money scale. The Democratic Heathers may outnumber their Republican sisters, but the Republican Heathers have more money to donate to politicians. And similarly for just about every name, male or female.

Among the men, the Jonathan is now the most liberal, giving 55% of his money to the Democrats. In fact, Jonathan is the only man to the left of the midpoint. But while Jonathan is a Democrat, John gives 63% to the Republicans. The difference here is probably ethnic/religious. Jonathan (Old Testament, son of Saul) is Jewish. John (the Baptist, New Testament) is Christian.

Age may also be a factor.  Younger, thirtysomething names like Heather and Ashley, Tyler and Clayton, lean to the right. So perhaps the youth vote, or at least the youth money, is not as firmly in the Democratic party as we might have thought.

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Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University.  You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

I watched the first U.S. Presidential debate of the election last night and I noticed something interesting about the coverage at CNN.  Notice that the live viewer information along the bottom includes the degree to which female (yellow) and male (green) Colorado undecided voters like or dislike what each candidate is saying (measured by the middle bar).

By choosing to display data by gender, CNN gives us some idea of how men and women agree or disagree on their evaluations of the candidates, but it also makes gender seem like the most super-salient variable by which to measure support.  They didn’t, for example, offer data on how upper and middle class undecided voters in Colorado perceived the debate, nor did they offer data on immigrant vs. non-immigrant, White vs. non-white, gay vs. straight, or any number of demographic variables they could have chosen from.

Instead, by promoting gender as the relevant variable, they also gave the impression that gender was the relevant variable.  This makes it seem like men and women must be really different in their opinions (otherwise, why would they bother highlighting it), strengthening the idea that men and women are different and, even, at odds.  In fact, men and women seemed to track each other pretty well.

It’s not that I don’t think gender is an interesting variable, it’s just that I don’t think it’s the only interesting one and making it seem so is problematic.  I would have loved to have seen the data parsed in other ways too, perhaps by rotating what variables they highlighted.  This would have at least given us a more nuanced view of public opinion (among undecided voters in Colorado) instead of reifying the same old binary.

Last week a secretly-taped video of Romney made headlines. In it, he said that 47% of America believes that they are “victims,” is “dependent” on the government, and likes it that way.  SocImages, like many places around the web, did some talking about who the 47% of people who pay no income taxes really are.

In this post, however, I’d like to make a different kind of point about framing and the sociological imagination, inspired by Ill Doctrine‘s Jay Smooth and Slate’s William Saletan.

Reacting to the release of the video, the media returned to a similarly clandestine video of Obama that had made the rounds during his first run for the presidency.  In it, Obama refers to Americans who are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment…”  So, six-of-one, half-dozen-of-the-other right?  Both statements are equally tone deaf and biased right?

No. In fact, one is embedded in a deep empathy and an understanding that circumstance (i.e., that thing that sociologists study) can shape one’s outlook, sometimes in negative ways.  The other is a straightforward criticism of a group’s character, with a lack of empathy and understanding.

Let’s take a closer look at how Obama introduced his (fairly criticized) comment about the bitter clinging to guns (transcript).  He begins by saying that people have a good reason to be unhappy with politicians:

In contrast, Romney’s comments are dismissive and accusing (transcript).   His targets — the 47% of people who are exempt from paying income taxes — aren’t embattled, fighting for a decent life despite political neglect, they’re “entitled” to something they haven’t earned.  They’re happy to be dependent on the government and don’t want it any other way.  They’re leeches, parasites, freeloaders, bums.

And, instead of saying that its his job to help those people see life a different way, Romney dismisses them entirely:

 [They’ll] vote for the [current] president no matter what… my job is not to worry about those people — I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives…

So, while some are arguing that Romney’s comments are just a politically-right version of Obama’s — equally biased and cynical — nothing could be farther from the truth.   Obama looks at Americans who will not likely vote for him and sees social structural reasons that their negative emotions are valid (even when they’re aimed at him), he expresses empathy for their plight, and seeks to connect with them.  Romney does nothing of the sort.  Instead, he condemns them as individuals and blows them off as potential constituents; and he encourages others to do the same.

In short, Obama has a sociological imagination that enables, even presses him to see the bigger picture.  He sees both individuals and the circumstances they live in.  Romney, for whatever reason, does not exercise a similar imagination.

Wanna hear it straight from Jay? I would too:

Salon posted a video by Benjamin Wheelock that illustrates changing voting patterns in the U.S. over the last century. He assigned each state a color based on voting for presidents, governors, and Congress for each year there were elections. Red indicates Republican, blue is Democratic; the darker the color, the more overwhelming the vote was for that party.

The video starts with 2011 and moves backward to 1912. What’s perhaps most striking today is that through the late 1970s, the South was a swath of Democratic blue. In the 1980s much of it turns purple, as presidential elections increasingly go Republican but Dems remain competitive in state elections. By the 2000s, it becomes much more solidly, and brightly, red as Republicans consolidate their popularity in the region.

It’s a quick way to highlight many major trends and turning points in U.S. political history, including changing stances on racial issues within the parties, the Democrats’ overwhelming dominance during the late ’30s as the country struggled to emerge from the Great Depression, and the clear shifts in the South and on the coasts over time.

Thanks to my colleague Pete for pointing it out!