Amendment

An idea for a constitutional amendment that occasionally comes up is to make all citizens (not just "natural-born" citizens) eligible to be president.  In November 2004, a Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll asked about it:  "Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow a U.S.citizen who was born in a foreign country to be elected president?"   The most obvious argument in favor of the hypothetical amendment is the principle of equal treatment, and the most obvious one against it is established tradition: the founders thought the restriction was important enough to put in the Constitution and we've done it that way for more than 200 years.   That is, support or opposition is related to what you could regard as the basic principles of liberal and conservative philosophies, even though the amendment was not a subject of current political controversies. 

The survey also asked "Would you favor or oppose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow a U.S. citizen, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in a foreign country to be
elected president?"  Schwarzenegger had been elected Governor of California in 2003, and was sometimes mentioned as a possible presidential candidate.  The comparison between answers to the two questions (which were asked to different randomly selected halves of the sample) seems interesting.  Answers to the second form presumably depend on two things:  your feelings about the general idea, and your views of Schwarzenegger.  Although the survey didn't ask people for their views of Schwarzenegger, other surveys taken at about the same time showed Republicans, conservatives, less educated people, and men had more positive views of him. 

I looked at race, gender, and age differences, and found nothing of note.  Support for the amendment by self-rated ideology

                                  no name           AS named
Conservative                34%                34%
Moderate                      27%                48%
Liberal                          38%                40%

The strongest difference was an unexpected one:  moderates were considerably more likely to support the proposed amendment when Arnold Schwarzenegger was mentioned.

Support by education:

not college grad             28%             43%
college grad                   43%             33%

When no name was mentioned, college graduates were more likely to support the idea (as I expected).  The mention of Schwarzenegger helped among non-graduates, but hurt among graduates.   I had thought that college graduates might be more influenced by principle, and less by their views of Schwarzenegger--there was some sign of this (10% difference between the two forms vs. 15%), but it wasn't clear. 

I wondered if the strong influence of naming Schwarzenegger among moderates might be because they tended to be less interested in politics, and therefore more influenced by the person than the principle.  The survey didn't have a question about interest in politics, but it did have one about whether you had voted in the presidential election, which had been held about two weeks earlier.

                                 no name          AS named
voted                            33%                  37%
didn't vote                    25%                  62%

Naming Schwarzenegger made a difference among non-voters.  The numbers in the category are small, so the size of the effect is probably exaggerated by chance, but it seems safe to say that it's real (p=.0002).  

The combination suggests that many non-voters and less educated voters were attracted to someone who was a political outsider.   There's obvious possible relevance to the 2016 election.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]