The tenth day of Christmas

In 2006, a CNN poll asked half the sample:

"Would you favor or oppose a bill that would allow illegal immigrants who have been in this country for more than five years to stay in the U.S. and apply for citizenship if they have a job and pay back taxes?"

and the other half:

"Would you favor or oppose a bill that would give amnesty to illegal immigrants who have been in this country for more than five years if they have a job and pay back taxes?"


79% said they would favor the first and 18% oppose.  For the second, it was 68% favor and 28% oppose.  So the word "amnesty" produced a less favorable reaction than a description of what it would involve, but more than two-thirds were in favor. 

I looked at breakdowns by party, self-rated ideology, and education, and didn't see any evidence that the effects of question wording differed by those categories.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The ninth day of Christmas

"Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?... There should be no restrictions on owning guns. There should be some restrictions on owning guns. All guns should be illegal for everyone except police and authorized persons."

            None     Some     All illegal
1993      6%         75%        17%
1998      8%          66%       24%
1999      4%          72%       22%
2009     15%         71%       15%
2011     15%         71%       14%
2012     13%         76%       10%
2012     13%         71%       15%
2013     17%         70%       12%

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The eighth day of Christmas

In the 1940s and early 1950s, there was a survey firm called the Psychological Corporation.  In  a survey from 1950, it asked "top movie stars earn from $200,000 to $500,000 a year.  Do you feel this is too much, too little, or about right?"  Then "how about baseball stars earning from $50,000 to $125,000 a year" and "how do you feel about top executives of large companies, earning from $100,000 to $200,000 a year."  According to the CPI, a dollar in 1950 was worth about 10 times as much as today (10.6 times, to be exact).  I don't know what top movie stars or executives typically made then, but according to the figures in Baseball Reference the very highest paid baseball players were indeed in the range that they gave (Joe DiMaggio made $100,000, Ted Williams $90,000, Stan Musial $50-65,000).

The results: 

                            Too Much           Too Little     About Right     DK
Movies                     53%                   0%               36%              11%
Baseball                   41%                   1%               49%                9%
Executives               44%                   1%                45%              10%

There have been more recent questions about baseball players and executives, although they didn't specify how much they actually earned at the time.  In 1985, 65% said baseball players were paid too much, which rose to 70% in 1995.  In 1986, 60% said executives were, rising to 74% in 1992.  Oddly, there don't seem to have been any questions after the 1990s. 


[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The seventh day of Christmas

My last post talked about the declining optimism about the future of today's youth among Republicans during Obama's time in office.  I was looking at the last survey for which individual-level data were available (December 2012) to see if I could find anything that shed light on it.  That survey had a number of questions about expectations for the next year, some of which go back a long way.  One of them was whether you thought the coming year would be "a year when America will increase its power in the world, a year when American power will decline."  Ultimately, it would be interesting to look at a breakdown by party, but here are the overall numbers:

Expectations in 2012 (ie expectations of 2013) were almost the most pessimistic ever, trailing only 1973.  Expectations in 2017 (ie expectations of 2018) were more optimistic, but still evenly split (49% to 49%).   As far as you can tell given the missing years, we seem to be in the most sustained low since the data began.   I was surprised to see that expectations bounced back strongly in the late 1970s--in 1979, 58% expected American influence to grow in 1980, only 30% to decline.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The sixth day of Christmas

Last April, I had a post about a question on the chance that "today's youth will have a better life than their parents."  At that time, the last time the question had been asked was June 2016 and the last time for which a breakdown by party was available was December 2012, and I wanted to see if there were any updates.  I found that it was asked again in March 2018, and that the Gallup Poll gives breakdowns by party for all surveys since 2008.    Here is a graph of the percent saying very or somewhat likely from 2008-18:

Republican (red) opinions became more optimistic between 2016 and 2018, and Democratic (blue) opinions became more pessimistic, but the change among Republicans was more than twice as big as the change among Democrats (+29 vs. -13).  In fact, opinions among Democrats didn't change much over the whole period, but opinions among Republicans did.  And as I noted in last year's post, opinions among Republicans kept getting more pessimistic after economic conditions started improving--they were more negative in June 2016 (4.9% unemployment) than they had been in January 2010 (9.8% unemployment). 

Adding the earlier years for which I can get breakdowns by party:

Up through 2008, the biggest gap between  the views of Democrats and Republicans was 12 points.  Under Obama, it grew to 23 points in 2011, then 30 in 2012 and 2013, and 27 in 2016.  Why did opinions diverge so much in those years?  It seems clear that the answer must involve Republicans, since they are the ones whose opinions changed the most.  I think it has to do with the nature of the criticism of Obama from Republican opinion leaders--not just the usual claims that Democratic policies would cost a lot and be ineffective, but that they were part of something larger and more sinister and that we were running out of time to stop it. 

I think this sheds light on why Donald Trump was able to easily defeat what people had thought was a strong field of Republican candidates.  All kinds of prominent Republicans had been saying that the policies of the Obama administration were going to destroy America and had to be stopped.  So Republican voters went for someone who seemed like he was ready to do whatever it took, rather than for people who'd said something had to be done and then been unable to do it. 

The fifth day of Christmas

"In general, do you think the criminal justice system in the United States is biased in favor of blacks, or is it biased against blacks, or does it generally give blacks fair treatment?"

                Favor   Against   Fair
July 1994        6%    25%       56%
June 1995        5%    32%       53%
Sept 1995       10%    38%       41%
Oct  1995        6%    33%       52%
Feb  2000        2%    43%       43%
Jan  2007        2%    37%       49%
Aug  2013        5%    35%       43%

July 2015        5%    49%       40%

Sept 2017        8%    47%       36%

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The fourth day of Christmas

IN YOUR OPINION, HOW WELL DO YOU THINK NEGROES ("blacks" starting in 1978) ARE TREATED IN THIS COMMUNITY--THE SAME AS WHITES ARE, NOT VERY WELL, OR BADLY?

                               

                         Same       Not well       Badly

July 1963            61%         23%            3%

Feb 1964             52%         24%           5%

Apr 1965             65%         18%           2%

June 1967            73%         18%           2%

July 1967             72%         15%           2%

May 1968            70%         17%           3%

July 1978             65%         18%           4%

May 1980            65%          19%          4%

Dec 1980             63%          20%          5%

Jan 1987              61%          24%          4%

June 1990            63%          20%          3%

Jan 1997              72%          18%          3%

Sept 1999            69%          23%          3%

March 2001         64%          24%          3%

Feb 2018              53%         38%          8%

Not much change until the one in 2018.  That had a different kind of sample: "interviews were conducted among participants in AmeriSpeak, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the national US adult population."  Hopefully there are some questions on which the AmeriSpeak panel can be compared to conventional surveys, because if it's real, the 2001 to 2018 change seems important.  By the way, the question was asked of both blacks and whites.  Black responses were broken out in a couple of cases, and were about 40% "same as whites", 40% "not very well," and 10%-15% "badly."

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research