[lbo-talk] Pew study of poll accuracy & Cries for revenge from the heartland?

snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Wed Apr 21 14:06:10 PDT 2004


At 04:00 PM 4/21/2004, John Thornton wrote:


>Since this is the second person to claim recently that more "cries for
>blood" came from the heartland than NY I would like to see the source of
>this belief. Seat-of-the-pants stuff or anything more substantial like
>results of a decent poll? Last time I checked disasters like major floods
>and tornados pretty regularly hit the midwest. Far more often than NYC so
>I don't think New Yorkers are somehow more likely to take disasters per se
>as SOP in their lives as some have claimed. Any actual evidence New
>Yorkers took the 9/11 attacks any "better" than the rest of the country or
>the midwest in particular? ChuckO lives in KC. Any feeling on your part
>Chuck that KC'ers wanted more blood spilled after the 9/11 attacks than
>the residents of DC? That is where you were residing before KC isn't it?

I remember Doug reporting the numbers, right after 9.11. NYers and people in Washington were more opposed to the War on Terr (tm). I don't know how much that held through Iraq invasion, though. And I'm wondering if it didn't soften to end up being more about the fact of its urbaness rather than its 911 experience. One thing that would be interesting is to control for the results to see if its a shared attitude among urban dwellers more generally, or much higher among NYers and DCers. s

Here's some material. while I didn't hunt everything down, it looks like what you can support is the claim that Southerners are most supportive of war, while the rest of the regions are similar. They're too close to say anything meaningful about their tendencies as uniquely different from those of Northeasterners. I mean, 2-3% difference is pretty darn insignificant and I'm always surprised when people make a big deal of it. w

Southerners Most Supportive of War

There also are sharp regional differences in war attitudes. Southerners are by far the most supportive of the decision to go to war, with 77% saying it was the right choice and just 18% disagreeing. Support is somewhat softer in the Midwest and West, and as few as 66% of residents of the Northeast believe that taking military action was the correct decision, while 27% say it was not.

Urban residents are also less supportive of military action than those in rural areas. Fully 79% of residents of rural areas say military action was the right decision, compared with 62% of those who live in large cities.

These regional disparities persist even when the different racial makeup of the regions is taken into account. Southern whites, for example, express some of the strongest support for military action (83% right decision, 13% wrong) while whites living in the Northeast and West are less supportive (72% right decision, 22% wrong). http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=179

But see how attitudes change with the question, here: http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/post911poll.pdf

Moreover, the profile of those who favor war versus those who oppose it increasingly resembles the electoral breakdown of the mid-1990s. The opponents are disproportionately women, minorities, senior citizens, the college-educated and residents of the Northeast, Midwest and Far West. The administration's core supporters are rural, white, male, southern Republicans without a college diploma. That's not a good recipe for building a national consensus and may not help the Republicans in November. Here, based on materials specially provided by polling organizations, is a rundown of who is opposing and who is supporting the administration's rush to war in Iraq. http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/18/judis-j.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040421/20edff7c/attachment.htm>



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