Punditry and sensationalist headlines

 A recent op-ed in the New York Times by Cecile Richards (former president of Planned Parenthood) says "Despite years of punditry and sensationalist headlines, the myth that Americans will always be divided on this seemingly intractable issue [abortion] is just that: a myth." Of course, no one knows how things will "always" be, but the standard view is that Americans have been pretty evenly divided on the issue for the last fifty years and that there are no signs of change, so the best guess is that things will stay that way.  According to Richards, the reality is that there's a solid majority in favor of legal abortion:  "According to Gallup, 80 percent of the country believes abortion should be legal under any or certain circumstances. And last year, American Bridge 21st Century, in partnership with Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Emily’s List, found that a majority of the voters polled (71 percent of women and 64 percent of men) felt Republicans were 'out of step with their own views' on abortion."  The first statistic clearly doesn't support her case, since "certain circumstances" can be very restrictive (for example, only if necessary to save the woman's life).  The second one sounded more impressive, so I followed the link.  It turns out that the survey involved "base and ambivalent voters on abortion; the samples excluded registered voters who are strong Republicans or are staunchly anti-abortion."  Although her statement is technically correct, since she said "the voters polled," it also doesn't support her case.  So the punditry and sensationalist headlines give a pretty accurate summary of public opinion on abortion. 

Although the survey excluded an important part of the public, it did raise some interesting questions.  The purpose was to see how supporters of legal abortion could appeal to persuadable voters.  One recommendation was to "remind voters what is at stake in the impending Supreme Court decision . . . including the potential for restrictive laws in their own state."  That led me to look for surveys asking people what they expected to happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned.  A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation poll asked "If Roe v. Wade were overturned, it would be up to each state to decide if abortion would be legal and in many states abortion would immediately become illegal. Do you think that abortion would continue to be legal in your state if Roe v. Wade were overturned, or would it no longer be legal, or do you not know?"  34% said it would continue to be legal, 29% that it would become illegal, and 37% said that they didn't know, but there were substantial differences among the states--for example, in California, 64% expected it to remain legal and 12% thought it would become illegal, while in Texas 12% expected it to remain legal and 55% expected it to become illegal.  These examples suggest that expectations are related to state laws, or the climate of opinion in the state, or both.  

The Pew Research Center compiled information about five kinds of laws:  bans on abortion in the first trimester (which would go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned), requiring doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges, mandated counseling, mandated ultrasound, and a waiting period after counseling or ultrasound.  They also showed state level figures on the percent who said that abortion should always or usually be illegal.  I computed an index of general restrictiveness based on those laws--the most restrictive was Louisiana, and eighteen states had none of them and tied as being least restrictive.  The correlation between the percent saying that abortion should  always or usually be illegal was .78.  On the state level, both existing laws and opinions about abortion predicted expectations--that is, people in states where opinions were less favorable were more likely to expect abortion to become illegal, even controlling for current state-level laws.  That leads to a question of whether people's expectations are based on their own wishes--expecting things to turn out the way you want them to--or on sensing the opinions of other people--either one could account for the relationship.  On the individual level, opinions about whether abortion should be legal have no discernible effect on expectations after you control for state.*  That is, it seems that people pick up the local climate of opinion rather than projecting their own wishes.  Of course, sensing the climate of opinion isn't that hard, because opinions on abortion are strongly related to partisanship--people just have to know if they live in a Democratic, Republican, or swing state.  However, there are some plausible reasons to expect that one's own opinions might matter--there are the tendencies to think that you are on the "right side of history," and to have a distorted impression of public opinion as a result of living in "bubbles" of like-minded people.  On the other hand, activists often motivate their side by pointing to worst-case scenarios--in this case, supporters of abortion rights saying that overturning Roe v. Wade would take us right back to the 1950s.  So the absence of a discernible effect for one's own opinions is interesting. 

*I also looked at a number of other factors--gender, ethnicity, religion, education, and party identification--and there was no sign that any made any difference except maybe religion (Catholics, evangelical Christians, and "other Christians") more likely to expect it to become illegal compared to mainline Protestants, non-religious, and non-Christian religions.  

[Date from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Who's being suppressed?

A lot of the commentary on the voting laws that Republican legislatures are passing or considering holds that they will not only reduce turnout, but that reduce it more among blacks and other minorities.  The Current Population Survey has a module on registration and voting (not who you voted for, just whether you voted) that includes a large enough sample to give state-level estimates of turnout by race and ethnicity.  I looked at the relationship between voting rates in 2020 and the "cost of voting" index that I discussed in my last post.  The regression results

                        White            Black        Hispanic        Asian

Intercept           70.9            63.1            53.7                 60.5

                        (0.6)            (1.3)            (1.1)                (1.5)

 

COV                -2.6            -1.3                -1.2                -1.3

                        (1.0)            (1.9)            (1.4)                (2.1)

N                        50                35                34                25

The cost of voting index wasn't computed for the District of Columbia, and group estimates were not reported for some states because of small numbers (less than about 50 people).   Values of the cost of voting index range from -1.69 (Oregon) to 1.29 (Texas). 

The estimated relationship is negative--less turnout where laws are more restrictive--but it's larger for whites than for any of the other groups.  Given the standard errors, you can't be confident that there are  really any differences among groups, and the relationship isn't necessarily causal.  Still, these results don't support the idea that restrictive voting laws have more effect on blacks or other minorities.*

However, there are lots of laws and regulations that affect voting, and this index is just one attempt to reduce them to a single value.  Another approach is to look at the differences in black and white voting rates by state.  The largest and smallest ratios of white./black turnout rates:

Mass.     1.9

Wisc.      1.7

Okla.      1.4

Oregon   1.4

Iowa       1.3

Wash      1.3

Ark.       1.3

...

Del          1.0

NC           1.0

Missouri   1.0

Penna.      1.0

Tenn.        1.0

Miss.        1.0

Maryland  0.9

Sampling error has a substantial effect on some of these estimates, so you can't put much weight on the position of any single state.  The important point is that there is no pattern--I can't see anything that either group has in common, even if you allow for a couple of exceptions.  

 This connects to an issue that I discussed a few weeks ago:  the nature of the contemporary Republican party.  There are a number of historical examples of "how democracies die":  fascism, the end of Reconstruction in the South, caudillismo.  Most critics of the Republicans see them in these terms--e. g., they are disenfranchising black voters, just like the "redeemers" did in the 1890s.  Other observers argue (correctly, in my view) that none of the examples really fit, and conclude (incorrectly) that there's not too much to worry about: it's just "one of many percolating dangers in the United States today."  What's happened, I think, is that the Republican party has discovered a new way to be anti-democratic. 

Suppression

 Traditionally the United States had low rates of voting compared to most democracies, with especially low rates among blacks and the working class.  Some of the biggest barriers, like poll taxes and literacy tests, have been abolished, and registration and voting are easier than they used to be.  However, there are still things that state and local governments can do to make voting easier or more difficult.  Some observers say that groups which favor the Democrats, especially blacks, still face more obstacles.  There's a lot of information on group differences in voting rates, but they are affected by interest, motivation, and other factors.  So I looked for questions about experiences while voting or trying to vote and found a poll conducted by the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion in January 2020.  It asked whether you had experienced some things while trying to vote:  one was "having to wait on long lines at your polling place".  Answers were a lot, sometimes, hardly ever, or never, which I coded 1-4 with higher numbers meaning more often.  I looked at various demographic factors and found two that made a clear difference:  ethnicity and type of place:

White             1.70

Black              2.06

Hispanic         2.09

Asian              2.77*

Big city          1.95

Small city       1.89

Suburb            1.85

Small town     1.70

Rural               1.44

Since non-whites and people who live in urban areas tend to vote Democratic, one might expect a difference by party, but none was visible:

Democrats      1.74

Republicans    1.76

Independents   1.78

 Why not?  There were also differences by state:

 People were more likely to report having to wait in long lines in "red states".**  That is, in partisan terms the effects of the state differences offset the ethnic and urban differences.  Why would this be?  My guess is that the Republican states generally don't spend as much on government, so they tend to have fewer polling places and fewer voting machines, relative to the people who want to vote.  I wondered if anyone had attempted to make an index of the general difficulty of voting by state, and found this, by Scot Schraufnagel of Northern Illinois University,  Michael J. Pomante II of Jacksonville University and Quan Li of Wuhan University. Southern states had the highest scores, and some Midwestern states were also pretty high, while states in the Northeast and Pacific coast had low scores.   The index was correlated with reported waiting time, somewhat more strongly than Biden vote was.   I didn't have time to look into exactly how it was constructed, but I think it's impressive that a correlation with state differences in reported waiting time is visible, since sampling error has a substantial effect on state-level estimates because of small numbers of cases. 

 

*The numbers are small, so it's not clear if the mean is really larger for Asian-Americans than for blacks and Hispanics, but it's pretty safe to say that it's larger than the mean for whites. 

**I limited it to whites since I thought that state effects might differ by race.  Only states with more 10 or more respondents are shown. 

Success

  This figure shows a summary of answers to three survey questions:  

1.  "Hard work offers little guarantee of success"  [agree/disagree]

2.  [choose between] "First statement: Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard. Second statement: Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people."

3.  " Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people" [agree/disagree]

The vertical axis gives the log of the ratio "optimistic" (disagree on 1, first statement on 2, disagree on 3) to "pessimistic" answers.  

 

I thought that #2 would get more optimistic responses than #1 and #3, because it explicitly presented the optimistic alternative.   It did get more optimistic responses than #2 in the early years, but the difference was pretty much gone by 2010--there was no trend in answers to #1, but a pessimistic trend in answers to #2.  #3 was only asked between 2012 and 2016, so you can't say anything about trends, but it clearly gets more pessimistic responses than the others. 

In an attempt to get a better sense of what was going on, I looked at breakdowns by education (college graduates vs. everyone else) for early and late examples of #1 (1987 and 2012), and #2 (1999 and 2020).  The percent giving optimistic answers:

1.  "hard work offers little guarantee of success"

            not grad      college grad

1987     65%                82%

2012     60%                75%

2.  most can get ahead vs. no guarantee

1999      75%                80%

2020      60%                55%

On #1, more educated people are more optimistic and the educationaldifferences are about the same in both years.  On #2 the educational differences are smaller, and they change direction:  more educated people are more optimistic in 1999 but less optimistic in 2020 (and that change is statistically significant).  

My interpretation:  When people are asked question #1 they think mostly of themselves, and because most of us believe in ourselves, we are more optimistic when answering about ourselves than about people in general.  The educational difference on that question is understandable if people are thinking of their own experience ("I worked hard and I.....").  Question 2 refers to "most people," so answers are more about perceived fairness of society.   The change in the educational differences supports something I've said a number of times, that more educated people are getting more egalitarian (despite what critics of "meritocracy" say).   But there was some shift towards pessimism among less educated people as well--that's consistent with the shift on questions on the causes of poverty (lack of effort vs. circumstances).    

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What could happen here, part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Republican elites took advantage of the complexity of the electoral system to make objections to Joe Biden's election--they knew that they weren't going to be successful, but figured that they would appeal to "the base."  One additional point that I didn't mention is that some of the complexity comes from the Constitution, which left the conduct of elections to the states, or more exactly, the state legislatures:  "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors."   As many observers have remarked, Americans have a reverence for the Constitution--not the philosophy behind it, but the words.  If something is in the Constitution, many people will think that it represents timeless wisdom.   I think this is part of the reason that Republican elites have been so reluctant to accept that Joe Biden won.  The objection that some decisions about voting rules (e. g. absentee ballots) were made by courts or by election officials may be a technicality to the average person, but if you believe we should follow the original text of the constitution, it seems like an important principle.  Moreover, it raises the possibility that a state legislature could decide to appoint the electors in a different way--for example, if the Democrats win the vote in 2024, a Republican legislature could decide that it's going to go ahead and appoint Republican electors anyway.  

This means that the Republican party has been able to drift away from support for democracy without really becoming authoritarian.