FURTHER DEMOGRAPHICS

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

 This blog in its last posting offered a hypothesis – or really a set of hypotheses – that various segments of the US populous feel and are apt to express being threatened.  Why?  Because they see how the changing demographics of the nation is causing shifts in the political sentiments and those changes are going against their beliefs and are being overwhelmed.  Here is the statement that posting shared with the reader: 

… [F]or those voters who are concerned over identity issues, the growth of more recent immigrant population – including first generation Americans – less white-based/traditional religiously affiliated people, and an increase in non-religiously affiliated people, life seems to be becoming more secular, less white, and more urban.  In 1992 the US urban population was 76% and in 2016 it was 82% (82.5% in 2019).[1]  Conservative, white, religiously prone people in the US, one can guess, are feeling more and more threatened.

 Does a review of more granulated demographic data support these general contentions?

          Along with the Pew report[2] that the previous posting utilized – published in 2016 – there is another Pew report[3] that was published in 2018 that looks in more detail at how the electorate feels about various issues in relation to a list demographic categories.  While this report was not meant to address what the previous article stated, one can make various commonsensical connections.

          This 2018 report uses the factor of community type or, as this writer refers to it, locality, to organize its findings.  The report sees locality – whether respondents to the report’s survey questions live in urban, suburban, or rural areas – as being an organizing factor about how people feel about the issues the survey addresses.  The issues are immigration, Trump (as a political figure), same-sex marriage, abortion rights, marriage (as an institution), race, and gender equity.

          Here is a listing of its findings:

 ·       Urban areas are heavily populated by Democratic or Democratic leaning people (62%), and rural areas are increasingly Republican (54%).  Suburbanites fall in between urban and rural areas, (47% Democratic or Democratic leaning vs. 45% Republican or Republican leaning) with a slight bias toward the Democratic Party.

·       61% of urban dwellers support legal abortion rights versus 41% of rural people doing so.  Locality does not affect this distribution of support or disfavor for abortion rights in that liberals support women having the right and conservatives do not across the three community types. 

·       Urban voters feel more strongly that the economic system unfairly favors the powerful, much more than rural people do.  But, again, controlling for party, the numbers breakdown with Democrats agreeing more strongly than Republicans regardless of whether the respondents live in urban or rural areas.

·       51% feel very cold toward Trump (as a political figure), 8% somewhat cool, 10% neutral, 9% somewhat warm, and 22% very warm.  Trump is seen more positively (warm or very warm) in rural areas (56%) and coolest (as in unapproachable) in urban areas (46%). 

·       In rural areas, younger respondents, at a much lower rate, judged Trump warmly than older respondents (44% vs. 66%).  In other age groups, judgements toward Trump reflected party affiliation numbers – Republicans saw him warmly, Democrats not so much.

·       In terms of the increases that non-white people represent in the population, Republicans find such a change to be negative, and Democrats are positive in comparable percentages as those relating to how people feel about Trump.  That is, those who see the President warmly see non-white population growth negatively and those who see him negatively on the warmth scale find non-white growth positively.

·       Rural Republicans tend to see same-sex marriage legalization as a bad thing (as high as 71% in rural areas); Democrats tend to see it positively (as high as 78% in suburban areas).

·       Democrats tend to see immigrants as strengthening America (as high as 81% in suburban areas) and Republicans see immigrants as threatening America (as high as 78% in rural areas).

·       51% of whites do not believe whites receive benefits that are deprived to blacks while 77% of blacks do see whites receiving them.  Locality does affect this perception; rural areas tend more to not see advantages for whites while urban areas are more prone to see them.  Consequently, Republicans don’t see these advantages (e.g., 72% in suburban areas).  Whether one does or not, numbers run consistently with conservative areas not seeing it and liberal areas seeing it.

·       Generally, across localities, younger Americans hold more liberal, Democratic Party views, older Americans hold conservative, Republican Party views.

While the two Pew reports this blog cites concerning current political divisions among Americans do not contradict each other, they are not carbon copies of each other.  The second is more detailed, but the first gives a more holistic sense of what is out there.  Neither one proves what is causing polarized politics in America today, but they do commonsensically give the reader a good sense about why and how it exists.  They do reflect a range of beliefs and attitudes one can relate to conditions leading some voters to being threatened.

That is, they find rural people to be conservative or urban voters to be on the liberal side of contested issues.  Suburban people are between but with a liberal bias.  This division indicates rural areas are Republican areas of strength, urban areas are Democratic areas of strength.  The reports give one real insights in how the nation breaks down demographically in terms of politics and those terms are changing in a threatening way to those who fall right of center.

---

[1] See “Urban Population (% of Total Population) – United States,”  The World Bank, n.d., accessed December 30, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2019&locations=US&start=1978 .

[2] “1.  The Changing Composition of the Political Parties,”  The Pew Research Center (September 13, 2016), accessed August 31, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/1-the-changing-composition-of-the-political-parties/ .

[3] Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, Ruth Igielnik, “2.  Urban, Suburban and Rural Residents’ Views on Key Social and Political Issues, Pew Research Center:  Social and Demographic Trends (May 22, 2018), accessed January 1, 2021, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and-rural-residents-views-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ .