“Does Sanders Have A Lock On The Youth Vote?”: It’s Still A Little Early For All Of The Assumptions
The huge story coming out of the Iowa caucuses is that young people voted for Bernie Sanders 84/14. Thus developed the meme that he has a lock on that age group around the country and writers like Nate Silver are attempting to explain the phenomenon. But does the polling bear that out?
The problem with examining the question is that there are very few polls of states that will weigh in after New Hampshire – and even fewer that provide information based on age. So with the caveat that these are merely individual polls and should be taken with a grain of salt, here is a bit of evidence to test the meme.
Based on this NBC/WSJ poll (Feb. 2-3), it looks like the New Hampshire results will closely mirror what happened in Iowa with those under 45.
Sanders 72%
Clinton 27%
One of the states that holds its primary on March 1st (Super Tuesday) is Georgia. Here is how the under 40 vote looks in a poll conducted by Landmark Communications (Feb. 4).
Sanders 13.5%
Clinton 61%
North Carolina holds its primary on March 15th. Here’s what Public Policy Polling (Jan 18-19) found for voters under 45 in that state.
Sanders 31%
Clinton 51%
Perhaps these polls from Georgia and North Carolina haven’t accurately captured the millennial surge in those states. Or perhaps Bernimania will catch on there as the vote gets closer. Or maybe, like other age groups, a more diverse collection of young people will vote differently than the mostly white group that we’ve seen in Iowa and New Hampshire. We’ll have to wait and see. But it’s still a little early for all of the assumptions about how Sanders has a lock on the youth vote.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 9, 2016
“Can Sitcoms Erase Bigotry?”: What Exclusion Otherizes, Inclusion Normalizes
So it turns out sitcoms can erase bigotry.
That’s the bottom line of a study recently presented before a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. And it doesn’t even have to be a particularly good sitcom.
To judge, at least, from a screening of its first two episodes, the Canadian sitcom on which the study is based was earnest, amiable, and about as funny as “Schindler’s List.” Apparently, however, Canadian television viewers liked it well enough. “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a culture clash show about life at a Muslim worship house in small town Canada, premiered in 2007 and ran for five years. Here in the United States, it’s available on Hulu.
Sohad Murrar, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, used the show to test whether entertainment media can reduce prejudice. She gathered a representative sampling of white men and women between the ages of 18 and 60, first testing them to establish a baseline measurement of their prejudices. Then they were divided into two groups. One was assigned to watch episodes of “Friends.” The other watched “Little Mosque.”
Afterward, when Murrar again tested the groups for prejudice, she found that while the “Friends” group showed no movement, there was a reduction in anti-Muslim bias among those who had watched “Little Mosque.” Nor was this a fleeting thing. Four to six weeks later, the “Little Mosque” group still showed less bigotry.
The study participants, she says, “were identifying with the characters. Just seeing these characters, these Muslims, go through everyday life situations that they themselves could imagine themselves in or they themselves could relate to … kind of led our participants to feel like, ‘Hey, yeah, that’s something I myself could experience.’”
Prejudice, she notes, derives from the identification of an “in” group and an “out” group and the social distancing of the former from the latter. It’s a process some have dubbed “otherization.”
For all that academia and news media might do to combat that process, entertainment media are uniquely positioned to neutralize it. It is one thing, after all, to read statistics or hear arguments on the humanity and equality of, say, African Americans. It is quite another to have Anthony Anderson in your den every week giving you belly laughs or to root for Denzel Washington shooting it out with bad guys on the big screen.
Murrar’s study is only the latest to quantify this. And mind you, some of us didn’t even need a study to know it. Some of us have always regarded the likes of Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll, Ellen DeGeneres and “Will and Grace,” Mary Tyler Moore and “Cagney and Lacey” as the unsung heroes and secret weapons of the movements for African-American, gay and women’s freedom.
Still, Murrar’s study underlines a truth often overlooked when the talk turns, as it has with this year’s snow white Oscar nominations, to Hollywood’s dubious track record on diversity. Namely, that inclusion is not some enlightened sop to political correctness. Nor is it just good business, though it is that.
Rather. Inclusion changes the society itself. It lessens fears, opens eyes, unsticks hearts, makes people better. What exclusion otherizes, inclusion normalizes.
In a nation that has seen Islamophobia rise with the inexorability of floodwaters and racial animus spike to levels not seen since Jim Crow, a nation where Holocaust survivors say a leading presidential contender actually reminds them of Hitler, that’s no trivial thing. There is a great power here and those of us who have been too long defined as “other” must use every form of pressure we can to ensure that that power includes us in the circle of what America deems “normal.”
Or else find more constructive uses for our money and our time.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; Featured Post, The National Memo, February 8, 2016
“It’s About The Nuts And Bolts”: Why African-American Voters May Doom Bernie Sanders’ Candidacy
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are now arguing about race, and like many such arguments in campaigns, it has nothing to do with any substantive difference between them on policy issues. But the stakes could hardly be higher — indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that if Sanders can’t find a way to win over large numbers of African-American voters, he will have virtually no chance of winning the Democratic nomination for president.
Which is why, when Sanders released an ad showing him amidst his many adoring supporters, Clinton ally David Brock, who runs about a hundred different super PACs and other organizations devoted to getting her elected (I exaggerate, but only slightly) gave an interview in which he said: “From this ad, it seems black lives don’t matter much to Bernie Sanders.” Because of course, if the crowd shots in his ad aren’t diverse enough, that must mean Sanders doesn’t care whether black people live or die. (Full disclosure: some years ago I worked for David Brock for a time.)
Naturally, the Sanders campaign was outraged, but Brock’s attack cleverly alluded to the period last summer and fall when Black Lives Matter activists were interrupting Sanders at speeches and pushing him to endorse their agenda. Sanders was the perfect target for those actions, because he’s a liberal eager to show African-Americans that he’s on their side, but also someone likely to make the kind of verbal slips that would allow them to criticize him.
That’s because despite his commitment to civil rights, Sanders hasn’t spent his political career in an environment where African-Americans are what they are in most of the country: the very heart of the Democratic coalition. Since Vermont is 95 percent white, Sanders hasn’t had to build up the kind of partnerships and habits of mind and work that other Democrats do, which is just one of the reasons he has a steep hill to climb with African-Americans.
What I mean by habits of mind and work is this: Every politician and political organizer has things they learn to do by reflex in order to make sure the groups whose help they need are appropriately cared for. For instance, if you work on a Democratic campaign, you’d damn well better make sure that every flyer you print up has a union “bug” on it, the tiny mark showing it was printed at a union shop. And when you have a public event, you make sure that the people in view of the camera are appropriately diverse. I have a vivid memory of a photo-op on a campaign I worked on as a young man, when one of the campaign’s senior staff, an African-American, looked at one such array of supporters positioned behind the candidate and saw that the black people were mostly on one side and the whites were on the other. “Why don’t we salt-and-pepper this up a bit?”, he said, and everyone looked around, immediately understood what he meant, and shifted positions.
But it’s about a lot more than optics. One of Sanders’ many challenges is to turn a campaign built on idealism and vision into a machine that can turn out votes on the ground — state by state, town by town, and precinct by precinct. As Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman points out, Sanders does best with liberal whites, and “there is only one state where whites who self-identify as liberals make up a higher share of the Democratic primary electorate than Iowa and New Hampshire. You guessed it: Vermont.” So as soon as those two states are behind us, the campaign will move to places where African-Americans, among whom Hillary Clinton remains extremely popular, will make up a much larger share of the vote.
While Sanders would argue that he has a strong case to make to those voters about why they should support him, Clinton has ties to them that go back decades. And as a whole (and keep in mind that what I’m talking about doesn’t necessarily apply to any one individual even if it holds true for the group at large), African-Americans have a pragmatic view of politics. They had to fight — and some people even died — to secure the right to vote that whites always took for granted. They have to keep fighting to maintain that right in the face of a GOP that would put every impediment to the ballot it can find in front of them.
Ask anyone involved in Democratic politics about winning black votes in primaries, and they’ll tell you that it isn’t about hopes and dreams, though those are nice too. It’s about the nuts and bolts: the social networks, the key endorsers and officials, the neighborhood institutions, the systems that have been built up in the most trying circumstances to get people to the polls. Those kinds of factors matter among every voting bloc, but they’re particularly important among African-Americans. You can’t blow into town a week before election day with a bunch of eager white 20-something volunteers from somewhere else and win their votes.
It even took African-Americans a long time to commit to Barack Obama — against Clinton — during the 2008 primaries, despite the fact that he would become the first black president and today continues to command near-unanimous support from them. It wasn’t until he won the Iowa caucuses, making clear that he had a good shot at winning the nomination, that they began moving in large numbers away from their prior support of Clinton and toward him. And it’s no accident that one of the main lines of argument Clinton has been using lately is that Sanders has been insufficiently loyal to Obama. There are lots of Democratic voters among whom that might resonate, but none more than African-Americans.
So Sanders has multiple challenges among African-American voters: to show them that he’s really on their side, to show them that he really can win, and to do the complicated work in the field that will get them to the polls to pull the lever for him. He may be able to do all that, but it won’t be easy.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 22, 2016
“Ornery People R Us”: Anxiety Is Pervasive On Both Sides Of Political Spectrum
In achieving their improbable surges in presidential polling, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have profited from the same wellspring of anxiety, a deep-seated fear about the future that is rising across the land. Their answers to that anxiety are very different — as their followers are very different — but they have both tapped into an undercurrent of unease that affects a broad swath of American voters.
And that unease is well-founded. In mid-September, the U.S. Census Bureau issued its annual report on wages, poverty, and health insurance. Its findings come as no surprise: Though the official unemployment rate is down to its lowest level in seven years, the percentage of people living in poverty — around 14 percent — hasn’t budged in four years.
Equally worrisome is the stagnation in wages, which haven’t risen significantly for more than a decade. “Anyone wondering why people in this country are feeling so ornery need look no further than this report. Wages have been broadly stagnant for a dozen years, and median household income peaked in 1999,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group, told The Associated Press.
And ornery people are. That’s the only thing that explains Trump, who for weeks has enjoyed the top spot in GOP presidential primary polls. Full of bombast, narcissism, and blame, the real estate titan has pinned Mexican immigrants as the purveyors of all that is destructive to the American way of life. It’s astonishing how much support he’s received for his proposal to deport the estimated 11 million who are here illegally.
There’s no doubt a good portion of racism and xenophobia among the Trump crowd; they are largely voters uncomfortable with the country’s increasing diversity. But they are also anxious about a future in which the American dream is out of reach for their children and grandchildren.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Sanders, Vermont’s self-described socialist in the U.S. Senate, is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money, attracting large crowds, and leading in New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary vote. His answers, at least, are not xenophobic: Among other things, he would increase taxes on the wealthy and end some longstanding trade agreements.
Sanders has long warned about income inequality, which has been growing for decades but was exacerbated by the Great Recession. Suddenly, ordinary workers saw their jobs disappear, their savings evaporate, their homes taken by the bank. Many of them have not recovered the ground they lost, and their traumas have invited fear bordering on panic.
Meanwhile, the rich have only gotten richer. The top 1 percent own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, and they hold a larger share of income than at any time since the 1920s and the Great Depression.
These trends are evident throughout the industrialized world; they’re not the fault of any single politician or ideological philosophy. According to economists, they’ve grown from a convergence of factors, including the technological revolution and the globalization of labor.
Still, the wealth gap is quite worrisome. It’s a recipe for revolution, the sort of gulf between the haves and have-nots that is characteristic of developing countries, where the ties of the civic and social fabric do not bind. It’s hard to overstate the potential for upheaval in a country such as this, where a diverse population is not held together by a single language or race or religion, but rather by the belief that opportunity is available to all. What happens when a majority of the people no longer believes that?
You’d think, then, that income inequality would dominate the campaign trail. But the subject was hardly mentioned during Wednesday’s marathon GOP presidential primary debate, where such pressing priorities as possible Secret Service code names were discussed.
That’s not good. While it’s hard to see either Trump (his bubble may already be bursting) or Sanders as a presidential nominee, the voters they represent aren’t going away. Neither is their anxiety, which could prove a disruptive force in American political and civic life.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, September 19, 2015
“Increasingly Out Of Touch”: Hobby Lobby Shows The Need For A More Diverse Supreme Court
The United States Supreme Court ended its most recent judicial term this week in a characteristically dramatic fashion. The Court often leaves the most contentious and controversial cases to be decided last, and this year was no exception. A deeply divided Court split 5-4 over the hashtag-friendly Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, an innocuous name that perhaps doesn’t accurately reflect the polemical questions which lie at the heart of the Justices’ deliberations, namely striking the appropriate balance between religious conviction and access to contraception.
The impact of the decision cannot really be known until the United States’ relatively new national health insurance scheme (aka ‘Obamacare‘) has been fully implemented. In essence, the Justices ruled that a specific subset of corporations — those that are ‘closely-held,’ which often means small and family-owned — could not be compelled to provide insurance coverage for certain methods of birth control if the owners of such companies judged such coverage to be ‘incompatible’ with ‘sincerely-held’ religious beliefs. However, the Court suggested that United States government could step into the breach and provide coverage as necessary.
To non-American audiences, the outrage that this decision has provoked may seem bewildering. Yet the ruling affects three things that are cultural touchstones in the United States: access to health insurance (or the lack thereof), religious freedom, and reproductive rights. The dissenting justices opined that it was a decision of ‘startling breadth’, which might essentially legalise future discriminatory practices by corporations, so long as they claimed a violation of their convictions. This may or may not prove to be the case; nonetheless, additional legal challenges to Obamacare’s provisions are a foregone conclusion.
Of perhaps more immediate relevance than trying to guess at the decision’s eventual impact is speculative analysis of the Justices’ motivations. The companies which brought suit in the Hobby Lobby case are run by people who identify with conservative Christian ideologies. The five male Justices who made up the majority in the case all identify as Roman Catholic, and are 59 years of age or older. There is no way to know how much their personal beliefs inform their decisionmaking in this particular case, but it’s not implausible to suggest a correlation. It is reasonable to wonder if the Court would have split on similar lines had the religious convictions under examination been Muslim, Jewish or Mormon.
The Court’s three female Justices found themselves in the liberal minority on the case, as they often do with decisions that touch upon hot-button cultural issues. It was predicted that they would vote in favour of unimpeded access to contraception, and it’s easy to dismiss their votes as influenced simply by gender — after all, birth control is still seen largely as a woman’s responsibility, however inequitable this may be. This is unquestionably an over-simplified analysis, and yet it is sure to be expressed. More interesting by far is to hypothesise how the case might have been decided differently if the medication at the heart of the controversy were indicated for treatment of a distinctly male condition. If someone’s ‘sincerely-held’ religious beliefs prevented them from providing insurance coverage to treat erectile dysfunction, would the Court’s majority have been similarly composed?
Such provocative questions matter. Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life. While this is supposed to save them from the undignified political posturing and short-term thinking that Americans have come to loathe in their Congressmen and Senators, it can also saddle the Court with Justices whose personal opinions have not kept pace with the ever-evolving beliefs of its citizens. Nevertheless, as there are septuagenarians on both sides of the Court’s ideological divide, both conservatives and liberals have an incentive to keep their favourites around as long as possible.
America’s demographics are changing rapidly, and its younger generations do not generally hold one easily identifiable set of beliefs marking them as either ‘progressive’ or ‘traditional’. Going forward, the Supreme Court will find itself increasingly out of touch if it continues to make decisions that primarily reflect the viewpoint of Christian Caucasian males nearing retirement age. Justices would do well to consider that as they begin their summer vacations. The world may look very different by the time the Court begins again in October.
By: Hilary Stauffer, Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics, Centre for the Study of Human Rights; The Huffington Post Blog, July 4, 2014
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