Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.  The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).

Could it be that there’s racism at work in Appalachia?  Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies?

The 2008 Presidential election — Obama v. McCain — offers some hints.  For those with short memories, the Bush legacy — an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe — may have hurt the GOP.  In that election, the country went Democratic.  The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.  But not everywhere.  The Times provides this map:

Still, it’s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.  As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is…

…almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:

One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.

Right.  The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry’s culture.

I’m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.  But David Weigel, in Slate, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries – Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.  Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?

As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.  Besides, there wasn’t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.

Cilizza is right that we can’t read voters’ minds.  But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.

Recently Talking Points Memo posted a 1960s coloring book sent in by a reader, who found it among her grandmother’s things. The coloring book, New Frontier, mocks John F. Kennedy and a number of his policies.

What’s fascinating is how closely some of the arguments in it match rhetoric in the presidential debate today. There’s concern that the President’s programs — in this case, Medicare — will negatively affect the quality of medical care, inserting the federal government between patients and doctors:

And an association with Harvard advisors was worthy of scorn then, too:

Another accuses Kennedy of attacking business at the expense of dealing competently with external national security threats:

It’s an interesting reminder that many of the attacks we see against President Obama today aren’t new; there’s the newest round in an ongoing struggle about social policies and political priorities.

Americans were recently asked whether they believed that President Obama could do much to lower gas prices.  The answer was highly correlated with political party affiliation: 65% of Republicans said “yes,” while only33% of Democrats said the same.

In fact, the President has very little control over the price of gas.  According to the Washington Post:

Today’s oil prices are the product of years and decades of exploration, automobile design and ingrained consumer habits combined with political events in places such as Sudan and Libya, anxiety about possible conflict with Iran, and the energy aftershocks of last year’s earthquake in Japan.

An expert calls the idea that a President can substantially influence the oil market “preposterous.”

So, does this mean that Democrats are smarter about econo-geo-politics?

Nope. It just means a Democrat is in the White House.  The pollsters, WP/ABC News, asked the same question in 2006, during the Bush Administration.  That year 73% of Democrats gave President Bush some of the blame for gas prices; only 47% of Republicans did.

(Red = answered “yes” in 2006; Blue = answered “yes” in 2012)

Such switches, argues political scientist Brendan Nyhan, are typical.  NPRreports: “On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.” Nyhan believes that the phenomenon might be related to “cognitive dissonance,” a sense of unease that comes from holding two incompatible beliefs at once.  If you like the President, in other words, it might be hard for you to also think that he could do something about gas prices, but isn’t.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

NPR’s Planet Money blog posted this image showing changes in major categories of federal spending over the past 50 years. Notably, though defense spending (which includes veteran benefits) is still the largest category of federal spending, it’s a much smaller proportion of the total budget than it was in the ’60s; spending on interest on our debt has also fallen quite a bit since the ’80s. On the other hand, spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (which didn’t even exist in 1962), and safety net programs (including food stamps and unemployment) have grown. The somewhat reduced “everything else” category includes everything from education to space exploration to agriculture and more:

Via The Sociological Cinema; data available at the Office of Management and Budget.

Last week, on the heels of Obama’s announcement that he supports gay marriage, NPR interviewed the President of the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut, about trends in American support for the issue.  Kohut explained that American opinion has changed dramatically, and unusually, in a very short time.  In 1996, for example, 27% of people supported gay marriage (65% opposed).  This “really didn’t change very much” for a while.  In 2004, when Republicans mobilized the issue to get conservatives to the polls, 60% still opposed it.  But today, in the space of less than a decade, we have more people supporting gay marriage than opposing it.  Some polls show the majority of Americans believe that we should have the right to marry someone of the same sex.

This trend is driven, in part, by young people replacing the old, but focusing on this overshadows the fact that essentially all Americans — of every stripe — show higher support for gay marriage than they did a decade ago.  Both men and women and people of all races, political affiliations, religions, and ages are showing increased support for gay marriage.  This is a real, remarkable, and rare shift in opinion:

Opinion by age:
Opinion by religion:
Opinion by political party:
Opinion by political orientation:
Opinion by race:
Opinion by gender:
Via Montclair SocioBlog.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.

Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:

Yesterday I stumbled upon a really great interactive graphic posted by the Guardian that summarizes the degree to which a number of rights and benefits are available to gays and lesbians in the U.S., by state. Each state is represented as a segment radiating out from the center of the circle; each colored ring represents a particular right, benefit, or protection:

• Light blue = whether state has a law addressing discrimination or bullying in the school system
• Purple = state-level hate-crime laws
• Pink = protection against housing discrimination
• Green = protection against employment discrimination
• Blue = right to adopt (lighter shade indicates individuals are allowed; darker shade means gay and lesbian couples are allowed to jointly adopt)
• Yellow = right to visit partner in the hospital
• Red = marriage

The different shades indicate differences in the scope of coverage (say, full marriage rights vs. domestic partnership — and it has been updated to reflect yesterday’s passage of the bill outlawing same-sex marriage in North Carolina — or whether a law bans discrimination based on sexual orientation but not gender identity); the Guardian website explains each issue. Their post also allows you to hover over a state and get a more detailed summary. Here’s the info for Nevada, for instance:

The graphic also lets you scale states by population if you want to get a better sense of the proportion of the U.S. population living in areas that do or do not provide these protections.