Winners and losers

 The Pew Research Center recently released a poll which asked whether certain kinds of people would gain or lose influence now that Joe Biden was president.  In addition to the overall figures, they showed breakdowns by party.  For example, 32% expected older people to gain influence and 35% expected them to lose influence (the rest expected no change), but there was a big difference between supporters of different parties:  among Republicans, 16% expected them to gain and 57% expected them to lose; among Democrats, 45% expected them to gain and only 15% expected them to lose.  

You might regard the gap between partisan perceptions of a group as a measure of esteem for that group--the extent to which supporters of a party want to claim it as one that they are concerned with.  So I computed the difference (Democrats gains-Democrats lose)-(Republican gains-Rep lose):  for older people, that's (45-15)-(16-57)=71.  The ranking, from most to least:

People like yourself        89

Military                    78      

Poor people                 76

Older people                71

Children                    63

Asian-American              54

Hispanics                   51

Whites                      46

Women                       42

Blacks                      39

Evangelicals                32

Young people                31

Men                         28

Unions                      22

Gay & lesbian               10

Corporations                -6

Wealthy people              -51

"People like yourself" isn't really comparable to the others, since it doesn't have a common meaning for Democrats and Republicans, but I show it anyway.  The general ranking of the groups is pretty plausible, although there are some surprises, particularly the high ranking of "poor people"--Democrats overwhelmingly thought that poor people would gain influence, but 42% of Republicans thought they would lose and only 29% thought they would gain.  Wealthy people stand out as a group no one wants to be associated with--Democrats think they'll lose influence under Biden and Republican think they'll gain.  It's interesting that they get a more negative reaction than "corporations"--often people are more favorable to people than to institutions.  

What about the relatively low ranking of men?  You could also rank the groups on another dimension:  the percent of people who thought they would either gain or lose.  This could be regarded as the extent to which the influence of the group was politicized--that it would rise or fall depending on which party was in power.  A scatterplot of the two dimensions:

Men rank low on what I'm calling politicization--most Democrats and almost half of Republicans don't expect their influence to change either way.  In contrast, about 80% of Republicans and 80% of Republicans expect a change in the influence of black people.  The rankings on this dimension seem to fit well with  my interpretation:  men and whites are well represented in positions of power regardless of which party is in office.  Asian-Americans don't have a high political profile, and children aren't seen as actors in politics (perceptions of which party is better for children might be more politicized).  

Pew has asked the same general question at the beginning of administrations going back to 1992 (although the list of groups has changed).  I will look at changes in partisan perceptions in a future post.