Many of the polls that we have been consuming voraciously have not included people without a land line (like me). In the figure below, we can see what a difference that makes in the results. Yellow bars are polls that included cell phones and grey bars are polls that did not. Those that excluded cell phones are significantly skewed towards McCain, and falsely so insofar as people without a landline vote.
From 538 via Thick Culture.
Matt S. sent in a link to a global electoral map showing how the world would vote in the U.S. presidential election. The images below–the first from The Economist and the second from two guys in Iceland–might be useful for illustrating the relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Thanks Matt!
In U.S. culture, the stereotype of Black women includes being too loud, aggressive, etc (i.e., masculine). Thus, to fit into the role of first lady, according to Reuters, Michelle Obama must “soften” herself. Note that the text accompanying this headline emphasizes that she’s just going to be a mom.
In contrast, Cindy McCain already “fits” “with her elegant clothes and pefectly coiffed blond hair.”
Click on either image to enlarge. Full articles can be found here and here. Via Jezebel.
See also this post where Michelle Obama is called an “angry black woman.”
p.j. sent in this radio clip from Howard Stern’s show. Some guy (not associated with Stern’s show, from what I can tell) went to Harlem to ask people if they supported Barack Obama. He would then present some of McCain’s proposed policies but say they were Obama’s and ask people if they agreed with the stance. People overwhelmingly agreed with McCain’s proposals when they were told the proposals were Obama’s. The guy hints that this is because Black people are voting for Obama simply because he’s Black.
Now, I’m sure that in some cases that’s true, just as it’s true that some White people are voting for McCain just because he’s White (hi, Mom!). And the lack of basic knowledge about the stances of the two candidates makes my head hurt.
But I suspect that if you did a similar experiment with other groups of voters, you would find a similar tendency–that is, I think lots of groups choose their prefered candidate based on all types of factors and may not have a thorough (or even vague) understanding of any specific policies. I am sure you could tell my grandma that *anything* was a Bush policy and she would say she supported it. I find it highly unlikely that this is something unique about Black voters, or even Obama supporters more generally. I would be willing to be that a decent portion of the electorate isn’t highly knowledgeable about the candidates’ stances and, once they’ve chosen a candidate (which might be because of race, but just as well might be because of the that they’re from, party affiliation, or that whole thing about being someone voters could “have a beer with”), would support whatever policy they were told the candidate supported. You can read that as voters being uneducated or stupid, but you could also see it as a rational reaction to the complexity of many issues: as a voter, you choose the candidate (or party) you believe in general has an outlook that will lead to the best decisions about public policy, and you assume that that candidate’s policies are probably preferable to what the other side would offer.
The other thing to keep in mind, which may be difficult for those of us who are political geeks and news junkies to really comprehend, is that not everyone is familiar with what phrases like “pro-choice” or “pro-life” mean. If you don’t care about politics that much, or about abortion as an issue, then those terms may be meaningless. I could be wrong here, but I bet my mom wouldn’t have a clear, immediate knowledge of which side of the issue each term refers to. So it’s possible that some of the individuals saying they liked Obama for being “pro-life” may not have even interpreted the phrase in relation to abortion.
This could be useful for a discussion of how things are attributed to race if non-White people are involved. On the way to work I was listening to a call-in show and a woman called in and identified herself as African American. She said that people keep thinking she’s voting for Obama just because he’s Black, but that they’re missing the important factor: she’s voting for him because he’s a Democrat, and she’d vote for a White Democrat over a Black Republican without hesitation. While I’m sure some of the people in the radio clip were loyal to Obama because of race, it’s also possible that some are just die-hard Democrats who vote for the Democratic candidate no matter what. I’m not saying that’s a good way to pick a candidate, just that the automatic assumption that African Americans who support Obama but don’t seem highly knowledgeable about his agenda are voting simply based on race might be inaccurate.
Thanks, p.j.!
Shoshannah F. sent in this clip (originally found here) from Bill Maher’s show, in which he makes fun of many stereotypes of African Americans by applying them to Whites and imploring viewers to not let their prejudice against Whites keep them from voting for John McCain:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iM0mUfATJk[/youtube]
It would make a great clip for discussing differences in how behaviors are attributed to race. Negative behaviors committed by African Americans (say, engaging in crime or being lazy) is often seen as an inherent trait of Blacks. When a White person does the same thing, his or her Whiteness is rarely brought up as a reason for the behavior. Whites are evaluated as individuals, while non-Whites find they are often evaluated as group members. Thus, the fact that the vast majority of the individuals involved in the financial meltdown is White is unlikely to lead to a stereotype that Whites are incompetent, bad with money, or inclined to engage in crime. Yet negative behaviors of non-Whites are often believed to provide evidence of what non-Whites are essentially like. For instance, I once had a conversation with a woman who told me about a coworker quitting without giving notice and then expressed her belief that it was because the woman was Black, and Blacks don’t have a good work ethic. Yet when I quit a crappy job at a college bookstore without giving notice back in college, I doubt it was attributed to Whites just not having a good work ethic.
This clip from “The Daily Show” also plays on some stereotypes about Blacks and Whites, as well as the idea that Obama isn’t “really” Black:
Thanks, Shoshannah!
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Nevada is a battleground state, and the state elections have gotten nasty (on both sides); the mailers I get every day don’t even pretend to be about issues any more, they’re just attack ads. I got this one, against a Democratic candidate, a couple of days ago:
I thought the photo they chose to illustrate “radical groups” was interesting. There were no specifics about what type of “radical” groups, or what they are radical about. To me, this image seemed like it was supposed to bring up the threat of radical (angry) feminists, but I don’t know if that was the specific type of radical this was meant to evoke or if that’s just what it makes me think of.
Anyway, it might be useful for a discussion of political discourses (for instance, how groups selectively use words like “radical,” “progressive,” “traditional,” “regressive,” and so on to depict change as either good or threatening), as well as what types of political agendas even appearances have become associated with “radical” politics (for instance, a woman wearing multiple necklaces and dreadlocks symbolizes radicalism).
Apparently for the last several presidential elections 7-11 has had a “7-Election” marketing campaign, in which they offer blue and red coffee cups and customers “vote” by choosing one or the other. Here is a screenshot from the 7-Election 2008 website:
You can go to the website and see the “voting” results map (current as of this morning), which shows two states at 50/50 and every other state going for Obama:
If you go to the actual website, you can hover over each state and see what the % breakdown is.
Now, in and of itself, I just thought this was slightly interesting as an example of the commodification of political choice (“express your voting preference through a coffee cup!”), and I thought it could be used as an example of made-up statistics that are entirely meaningless. For instance, at the 7-11 near my house, I noticed they only have blue cups available, so it would be impossible to “vote” for McCain. Anyone with just some basic common sense could think of tons of problems with this as a real methodology–it didn’t even really seem worth my time to go into much detail about why a poll based on sale of coffee cups is unscientific and stupid.
But then I noticed something on the website: according to the website, results are reported weekly in USA Today (although I wasn’t able to find links to any weekly reports, which seemed odd). I know USA Today isn’t considered a high-quality newspaper by a lot of people, but still, it’s at least ostensibly reporting news. The 7-Election website also has a link to CNN, so perhaps they are partnering with them, too. Editor & Publisher ran a story on it. The results of a marketing scheme to sell coffee is being treated as news. I’m going to try to use it in class to discuss how things get defined as “newsworthy,” and who sets the agenda for what we’re going to talk about. Here we have a company getting free publicity for its marketing promotion because that marketing promotion has been declared “news.” What important information about the world is being ignored in favor of this? How does treating this as newsworthy legitimize it, as though these statistics are meaningful or accurate? Does that increase sales for 7-11?
I found a lot of comments on blogs where people claimed that after hearing about this campaign, they went out and bought coffee just to “vote” for their preferred candidate, and a few who said they refused to buy coffee because the store was out of the cups they wanted. I find this entire thing incredibly bizarre, and I don’t see why news outlets and individuals are buying into the idea that this is anything other than a way to convince more people to buy 7-11 coffee.
NEW! In our comments, Penny pointed out that Baskin Robbins does the same thing. Here are the results from this suspicously delicious poll as of the morning of Nov. 4th:
Elizabeth Dole (R) is running for Senate against Kay Hagen (D) in North Carolina. In the campaign ad below, Dole’s argument against electing Hagen is that she is supported by “Godless Americans” who believe in the separation of church and state. It is a nice example of the demonization of athiests (which, as we have seen, exceeds even the demonization of Muslims these days). (If the video doesn’t embed, click here.)
Found at The Daily Dish.
