Interruption

My last two posts were on polls of college student voting from the 1940s-70s.  I intended my next post to be on polls of faculty voting, but I found more information than I expected, so it will take some time to put it together, so this post will fill the gap.

Earlier this year, David Shor posted the following figure on Twitter and wrote "Explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters" 

This was surprising to me, so I looked for similar questions to see if they showed the same pattern.  In 2022, a Pew survey asked if your opinion of Jews was very favorable, somewhat favorable, neither favorable nor unfavorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable.  It asked parallel questions about six other groups:  Evangelical Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, mainline Protestants, and atheists.  The data set didn't include exact age, but classified people into four groups:  18-29; 30-49;50-64; and 65 and up.  

The means by age group, with 5=very favorable, 4=somewhat favorable.....1=very unfavorable.

Although Jews got lower ratings from younger people, they were still the highest-rated group, as they were among all age groups.  Moreover, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, "mainline Protestants (such as United Methodists, Episcopalians, etc.," and Mormons also got lower ratings among younger people, and the slopes were as large or larger than the slopes for the rating of Jews.  

In the oldest group, 51.2% said they had a favorable view of Jews and 5.2 said unfavorable; in the youngest, it was 39.7% and 7.5%.  The Blue Rose question didn't include a "neither favorable nor unfavorable option," and if you allocate that in proportion that gives about 8% unfavorable in the oldest and 16% unfavorable in the youngest.  That's a smaller difference than the Blue Rose data, but still substantial.  However, the comparison with the other religions suggests that the favorable/unfavorable question is not a particularly useful measure of antisemitism.  Other surveys have tried to measure antisemitism by asking people if they agree with various stereotypes about Jews, and this seems like a more promising approach in principle, but those questions are less common.

How should the differences among age groups in favorability ratings be interpreted?  I would say it's a mix of two things:  younger age groups have less favorable views of religion in general, and more favorable about the two groups that groups that are outside the bounds of traditional American religious beliefs.**  If you just extrapolate, it seems that atheists and Muslims will soon be the highest-rated groups among younger people.  However, I don't think that will happen--instead, the ratings of atheists and Muslims will level off, and there will be a tendency for ratings of different groups to cluster around 3.0:  i.e., more people treating religion or lack of religion as a private choice, not for them to judge either way.

*I learned about it from a recent Substack post by Matthew Yglesias.

**"Traditional" in terms of the memory of people who are alive today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]