Shock news: polls reveal that most Republicans probably believe Obama is actually president

Sometimes too much digital self-righteousness can be bad for your faith in new media. The picture of the world you get from the blogosphere can sometimes resemble a roomful of hysterical teenagers screeching at each other about how cruel their parents are. Take this kerfuffle over the Birthers. An unpleasant, unconvincing theory that Obama might not be American, largely - albeit not exclusively - held by a certain type of basically old, Southern, white racist, has been presented as a powerful and threatening movement taking over the Republican party and about to condemn the United States to a new age of darkness and suffering.

The reality is:

1. According to the main DailyKos poll on the matter, substantially more Republicans think Barack Obama is a citizen than think he isn’t.
2. Despite being the Birther heartland, according to first reports of the PPP poll about to be released (see here and here) more Virginians think Obama is a citizen than that he isn’t.

The danger is that if liberals go around blaming Obama’s falling numbers on loony theories circulating amongst Republicans, they run the risk of failing to respond effectively to the really significant opposition Obama faces over healthcare and the economy during the August recess.

The Cassandra argument in its purest form is that the Birther movement represents a significant and threatening portion of the population. The Republican party, where they live, has been taken over by racist loonies who are so obsessed with defeating Obama that they’ll abandon any pretence of constitutionality and consider such things as secession and overthrowing the president just because he’s black. If we’re not careful they’re going to turn up with their guns and start shooting at us in our nice coastal towns. Some even think Obama is the Antichrist.

Given this view, it was hardly surprising that there was great interest in last week’s DailyKos poll in which 58% of Republicans were outed as Birthers. On YouTube, Crooksandliars fired up the 58% figure with DailyKos editor Markos Moulitsas. Moulitsas said, “Now, we expected Republicans obviously to have a sizeable fringe component that really believed that Obama was not born in this country but we did not expect over half of Republicans to really fall out for that Birther thing.”

All seems pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? The Republican party is in the hands of wingnuts. Liberals are the saviours of America.

Except then I went to the WorldNetDaily website, which is pretty much the Ground Zero of the Birther conspiracy theory. I found that the site was happily citing the DailyKos findings itself. Now, call me a cynic, but when left and right are in agreement, I tend to get a little suspicious about reality...

Now, I’m no pollster and I don’t know how reliable either the poll or the polling agency was. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. But accuracy doesn’t matter so much if you read the questions the way you want to.
As said above, the figures have almost universally been reported as showing that 58% of Republicans are Birthers. If you take the 60 million people who voted for McCain, that would seem to suggest that nearly 35 million Americans, along with another 35 million who voted for other candidates or not at all. “The numbers are really clear,” Moulitsas says, “Republicans actually believe this nonsense.”

But are the numbers really so clear? Actually only 28% of Republican respondents explicitly answered “no” to the question about whether they thought Obama was an American citizen. More of them said they didn’t know, and many liberals – as Moulitsas did – have just lumped these together with the Birthers anyway. Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying 28% is a good thing. Nor that it’s good that people aren’t sure. Nor that some of the people who said "not sure" aren't unsure in a Lou Dobbs kind of way. But it’s a lot less worrying than 58%. In fact, substantially more Republicans said that “yes” Obama was a citizen than said “no” he wasn’t. Moreover (this is where my maths gets risky, so apologies if this is hogwash), if, for the sake of argument, you add 114 Independents to the Republican tally (so that the Dem-Rep ratio matches the 52.8% to 45.6% represented in the election last year), you’ll find that the ratio is more like 24% would say “no” Obama was not an American, whilst 49% say “yes.” So, roughly a quarter of Republican voters will pick up anything to attack Obama with, but more than twice as many have bigger fish to fry.

Proposed DailyKos alternative headline?: “Poll shows GOP is in the hands of conservatives who believe Obama is legitimate president.”


Similar could be said for figures about the South (even despite Weigel’s argument that 70 percent of Southern whites doubt Obama’s birth). I'm not going to deny here that there's plenty of racists in the South. Even more important, though, is the pretty much unmentioned fact that by far the largest section of “no’s” are found among the over 60s. That is, people who grew up in a segregated America. Only 4% of 18-29s across the whole country have any doubts about Obama's birth.

Another suggested alternative news headline for DailyKos: “After fifty years of civil rights progress, racism slowly dying out in America.” Just wait for those hits, boys!

I think, knowing no better, we should put the “don’t knows” down as Doubters, not Birthers. There’s evidence already in the legal challenges raised that suggests people are confused about the meanings of “birth certificate” versus “certificate of live birth”, and about “natural born citizen” versus “naturalised citizen” versus “citizen.” Plenty of people are just a bit dumb and confused without planning to take anyone hostage about it. Moreover, Push Polling has shown in the past that pollsters could even be putting the doubt into the respondents’ heads, rather than getting some deep-seated feeling out of them. So, no, Moulitsas, I don’t the numbers really are so clear.

Remember also that in this context (after the past eight years), the rump are the only ones who’ll be publicly owning up to Republican party membership when a stranger phones them up. The party is seriously detested at the moment. It turns out that in this poll more people called themselves Independents (601) than they did Republicans (527). Ralph Nader must be delighted!

I don’t think it’s a major leap of logic to assume that those people who’d respond “Hell, yeah, I’m proud to be a Republican” to a guy on a telephone are also disproportionately more likely to be the ones to say, “Hell, no, bubba, that black man ain’t no kinda ‘Merican... now where’s mah Bud and shotguhn?” As one commenter on Paul Krugman’s blog put it, “If you call people at home and start asking them silly questions like “do you believe the world is flat”, how many of those with IQ over 110 will bother talking to you? And how many dimwits will stay on the line and enjoy blabbering about the UFO’s that landed in their aunt’s garden last week?”

Of the 2,400 people the pollsters called, 11% (or 264 people) said they believed Obama wasn’t a citizen. And even 11% is worrying, right? That’s potentially 30 million people, isn’t it? 30 million people who really should be worrying about other things. And it is disproportionately centred on the Republican Party. Well, yes, yes, yes, and yes. And again, I’m not trying to excuse anyone of this 30 million who might be trying to veil racist garbage behind a mask of constitutionalism. But what is this “movement” anyway? Responding to a poll doesn’t mean you’ll go out and do anything about it.

My gut feeling is that you should define a movement as having a minimal requirement of people actually moving. And if you did, you’d be looking at a fraction of that 11% really counting as Birthers, even amongst the out and out “no’s.”

More on this later...

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