Muslim favorability and Obama support

There is understandably much attention devoted to the bigger impact race will undoubtedly have in this election than in the all white contests of the past. Much less has been said, however, about the greater role another form of prejudice will likely play. Despite the fact that they are all Christian, the figure above shows that (even with controls in place for relevant ideological and demographic factors) attitudes towards Muslims have a much bigger impact on evaluations of Obama than President Bush, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. Indeed, all else being equal, moving from least favorable to most favorable increases one’s evaluation of Obama by nearly thirty percentage points.

 

 

One should proceed with extreme caution, however, in interpreting the relevance of these results for the current campaign. A number of questions arise about the robustness of this relationship. The biggest cause for pause is that the data used in this plot are now over a year old. It is quite possible that in the early stages of the primary campaign Americans were evaluating Obama on different criteria then they are now. Partisan and ideological predispositions may now be brought much more heavily to bear on evaluations than they were in August 2007 because he is the figure head of the Democratic Party.

 

The second objection is that the relationship between Obama evaluations and Muslim favorability could simply be an artifact of the greater role of racial resentment alluded to in my previous post. After all, it would make sense that those harboring prejudicial views against blacks would also be less inclined to like Muslims. Indirect evidence indicates that this is not that big of a concern, though. Previous surveys show that the correlation between racial resentment and opinions of Muslims is not strong enough to significantly weaken the result shown above. Or in other words, any effect of Muslim favorability on Obama support is mostly independent of racial evaluations.

 

The most interesting question in my opinion is whether Obama activated attitudes towards Muslims because respondents think he’s Muslim, or if his name alone is enough to make such considerations salient. I have to get really indirect to provide an interpretation on this one. Respondents were asked if they thought Obama was a Muslim for the first time in March 2008. As might be expected, there was a large educational disparity in the percentage of respondents who knew Obama was a Christian. 73 percent of college graduates, for instance, answered correctly compared to only 37 percent with a high school education or less (http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1277 ). The effect of Muslim favorability on Obama evaluations, however, is nearly identical for college and non-college grads. This suggests that any enhanced impact of religious attitudes might (and I stress might) not be solely attributable to mistaken beliefs about Obama’s religious affiliation. His name alone could be enough to activate attitudes about Muslims.

 

As preliminary as this analysis is, it indicates that pollsters and the media should not only pay attention to race but religious attitudes as well.

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Taylor says:

Racism again, I don't care about obama's family history. Btw check out president address http://www.presidentaddress.com Taylor

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