I have the same reaction I've had for some time: I really do wonder how large the subset is of those who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya (or elsewhere) but who also are totally unaware that there's anything important about it. I mean, I suspect if you did a poll of baseball fans I suspect that you would find a fair number of them who believed that Alex Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republican and not, as he actually was, in New York City -- but none who believe that it matters at all, which of course it doesn't for any baseball reason. I strongly suspect that a decent-sized chunk of "birthers" are aware of neither the natural born citizen requirement nor that there's any controversy about the whole issue; they heard someplace that Obama was board abroad and he has a funny-sounding name, so they figure he was foreign-born and that's sort of the end of it, no big deal.
(And that's outside of the presumably small, but perhaps real anyway, segment of the population who may believe that someone born in Hawaii was not born in the US, including anyone who believes incorrectly that he was born before statehood and that therefore he was not born in the US).
As far as I know, we don't even have a baseline to compare it to. How many Americans believe Mitt Romney was born in the US? How many believed that John McCain was (and recall: he wasn't)? How many believe Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in the US? On each of these: how many would say "not sure"? Wouldn't knowing those answers help us better interpret supposedly birther sentiment?
Perhaps I'm wrong. It could be that a full one-fifth of the US population really believes that Obama was born in Kenya and has conspired to cover it up, producing false documents, in order to evade his Constitutional ineligibility for office, and another 25% of all Americans are hard pressed to choose between that story and the truth. I don't know! And of course it's still interesting if a lot of people have misinformation, whatever it means to them.
But I really wish we could get a bit more than we have on this one.
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I wonder about the converse, actually: How many people who answer that they think he was born abroad don't *actually* believe that as a true fact, but channel their other dislikes of him into that answer.
ReplyDeleteThe mind is a funny thing, and I can imagine people rejecting him as a "foreigner" as a way of expressing their resentment of his politics, his race, etc.
Yes, that's another possibility, although it's a bit harder to imagine how pollsters can get around it.
DeleteI would lean towards anonymous' view because I seem to remember a lot of polls showing a huge partisan gap in terms of who believes the president was born in the US and who doesn't.
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is that George Romney definitely wasn't born in the U.S. and ran for President anyway. I saw a thing alleging that the whole eligibility question is kind of legally vague and ill-defined. Or is it different because Obama had only one citizen for a parent?
ReplyDeleteI think of this as being similar to American views on evolution. You can go to a web page maintained by the NIH and directly compare sequences of human, mouse and rat chromosomes. If you did that, you'd realize that they are virtually identical, except that they are cut and pasted at random into different molecular chunks. Not a lot of room for a devoted Creator to hand-craft individual species.
ReplyDeleteNonetheless, many Americans "don't believe in evolution." Or that the earth is more than 8000 years old.
You really should try making a Kickstarter to do this poll. Figure out how much it would cost to commission this poll and then put it out there. I'd pay $20 to get these results. Maybe there are enough other people who would as well that it would get off the ground. Especially if you can get promotion from other political bloggers.
ReplyDeleteOK, I'm going to say what a lot of readers are probably thinking. This poll shows that 45% of Americans are stupid, insanely partisan, or barely paying attention, but getting info from sources in the former two categories.
ReplyDeleteBut it's worse than that. There are certainly stupid, insanely partisan, and inattentive people among the 55% too.
Why do we need such depressing polls anyway?
I'm curious what the Constitutional question really is. Isn't a child born abroad to a US citizen mother who is travelling still a natural-born citizen who is Constitutionally eligible to be President?
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter where he's born, b/c his presumed father, obama sr was a brit. Progeny flows from the father and is universally accepted as well as defined in BNA of 1948 to which obama sr +jr are subject. Consequently, obama is Constitutionally ineligible to be president. The dems know it as do some reps. This means we not only have a real Constitutional crisis on our hands but the majority of our elected people have committed felonies and are looking at serious prison time.
DeleteI did some polling related to the place of birth a couple years ago and the findings are here.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-berinsky/poll-shows-false-obama-be_b_714503.html.
I also have some polls that I'll be reporting on YouGov next week that get at some of the important questions you raise. To preview, when you ask people about where Sarah Palin was born, you get a very different set of answers.
If a pollster asked me where I think Sarah Palin was born, I'm not sure what I'd answer - it's just too damn tempting. So I can see how partisanship might influence how seriously one takes the question, and whether one wants to send a message about the person apart from the actual facts of her place, or planet, of birth.
DeleteAdam,
DeleteVery much looking forward to part two. And certainly not criticizing what you've done when I'm asking for more.
On 2010 survey: doesn't the partisan divide simply show that Republicans are more likely to be exposed to the rumors than Democrats? It doesn't quite answer the question I have, which is whether they understand it to be a (Constitutional) big deal; it also doesn't get at whether they're aware that believing Obama was born in Kenya also means believing that he's lying and has engaged in a conspiracy to cover up his birthplace. I find it entirely possible that someone (perhaps aided by something vaguely heard, perhaps just from his name) might believe he was born in Kenya without being at all aware of the rest of it.
Thanks for stopping by!
Jonathan, very good questions. I've been more interested in examining whether people truly believe what they say when they endorse statements like this. But whether they understand the meaning of the citizenship question is important. I don't have have direct polling on this, but indirect evidence suggests that people do understand the implications -- consider, for example, the convergence on the "Kenya" narrative when I asked where people thought he was born.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't that just show that they've been exposed to enough of the rumor to give that answer? I do know that there are frequent "ha ha he was born in Kenya" jokes that could be read innocently (at least on the Constitutional question) -- although of course there are also birth certificate jokes which imply wrongdoing on Obama's part.
Delete"including anyone who believes incorrectly that [Obama] was born before statehood and that therefore he was not born in the US"
ReplyDelete"How many believed that John McCain was [born in the U.S.] (and recall: he wasn't)? "
What's the difference between being born in pre-statehood Hawaii and being born in the Panama Canal Zone, as McCain was? Both were U.S. territories. I'd say births in both of them count as U.S. births.
Sorry -- you're saying "incorrect" about pre vs. post statehood for Obama's birth. But I'd say anyone born in a U.S. territory was born in the U.S. regardless.
ReplyDeleteBut my question here isn't what an informed person knows; it's what ill-informed and perhaps indifferent people might answer to a pollster.
DeleteI think that issue was clarified for Goldwater's run for president in 1964. He was born in Arizona before statehood was granted.
DeleteThat is an entirely different issue and he would be grandfathered in.
DeleteWouldn't we want to take a step back, first, and ask citizens the probability that a random short-form birth certificate, otherwise meeting state department requirements for passport issuance, is in fact a fraud? I'd guess that pretty much across the political/educational/cultural spectrum, folks will reply something in the ballpark of "1 in 5,000" to that general question.
ReplyDeleteAt that point, and in consideration of Obama producing just such a document at the very outset of the campaign, what additional interesting thing can we learn about birthers? This is not to say that Obama - or, really, any of the rest of us - was absolutely positively born in the US for being in possession of a State Department-approved bc.
But as far as investing resources to parse phenomena, wouldn't it be about as interesting to learn more about why the mountain people think little green men live on the moon?
Sorry - that didn't come out quite right. Once we've established that the probability of fraud in the original, short-form bc is very very low (to say nothing of the even lower probability with the unsuccessful Orly Taitz aftermath, long-form document, etc), where does that leave us?
DeleteBirthers hate Obama for some reason. Are birthers racists? Xenophobes? Anti-liberal? Some, or all, of the above?
Who has a poll question to clarify the reason for a hatred that respondents would never acknowledge they feel?
The probability is even narrower than that, even disregarding the disclosure of the scanned long-firm certificate.
DeleteThe original short-form birth certificate wasn't just produced by the Obama campaign: The director of Hawaii's Department of Health, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, personally affirmed having seen the original document. So it's not just the probability that the short-form certificate was forged, but that a state official was also in on it from the inside. It's just so preposterous.
"I really do wonder how large the subset is of those who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya..."
ReplyDeleteWould that include Barack Obama, the original birther? After all, Obama was the one who claimed he was born in Kenya in order to sell more books.
"And that's outside of the presumably small, but perhaps real anyway, segment of the population who may believe that someone born in Hawaii was not born in the US, including anyone who believes incorrectly that he was born before statehood and that therefore he was not born in the US"
ReplyDeleteMy father teaches the driving classes for the CDL and got a phone call in 2009 from one of his students in tears at the Albuquerque New Mexico DMV. She was a woman of color: native Hawaiian extraction whose only other form of ID was her State of Hawaii drivers' license. The (white) woman behind the counter, backed up by her supervisor, was demanding a "Green Card or proof of US citizenship" before they could give her a New Mexico CDL driver's license!
Also worth mentioning, there is a bizarre subset of birthers who believe he may have been born in Hawaii but that since his father had never become a US citizen Obama was actually Kenyan at birth.
ReplyDeleteOf course this would make Chester Arthur an illegitimate president as well.
For those who are interested, there are, worldwide, two basic standards for assigning citizenship: jus soli (law of the soil) and jus sanguinis (law of the blood). Some countries follow one or the other; the United States follows both. Thus, anyone born in the United States (regardless of parents) is considered a citizen under jus soli and anyone born to a U.S. citizen (regardless of place of birth) is considered a citizen under jus sanguinis. Obama was born in the United States and had at least one parent who was a U.S. citizen. McCain certainly had parents who were U.S. citizens; I'm not sure if the Canal Zone technically qualified as a territory, although it was certainly treated that way, but I wouldn't quibble about it. McCain is a citizen. The complication comes from the Constitution throwing in the extra words "naturally born" in front of the word "citizen" without explaining how that is or isn't different from any other kind of citizen. It's generally been taken to mean "born in the United States," but I don't believe there's been any authoritative ruling on that. (Anyone know for sure?) I don't see why it couldn't mean, say, "born a citizen" as opposed to an immigrant who became a naturalized citizen later in life. It could also be taken to mean any citizen, but people would object that the words "naturally born" were put in on purpose and therefore must signify some kind of limitation.
ReplyDeleteAn aside, making no relevant point in particular: Bill Richardson's father was a U.S. citizen living in Mexico and his mother was a Mexican citizen. His father also had a U.S. father and a Mexican mother. Richardson's father was born on a ship at sea, and in his lifetime people questioned his citizenship. So when Richardson was born, the father sent the mother to Los Angeles for the birth so that no one would ever question Bill's citizenship. Otherwise, he still could have claimed citizenship under jus sanguinis, but the "naturally born" clause, no doubt, would have complicated his attempt to run for president.
DeleteIt doesn't matter where Obama was born; since his mother is (indisputey) a US citizen that makes Obama one (natural born) as well. I wish someone would cover this.
ReplyDeleteMy child was born when my husband and I lived in Iran during the days of the Shah. She was issued a U. S. State Department birth certificate, and when I asked if she could be president someday, I was told that she could because her parents were U. S. citizens. Why wouldn't it be the same for President Obama?
ReplyDeleteThis is a made up controversy.
Just ran across this on an International Law blog:
ReplyDeletePeople born in the states, as we know, are considered citizens under the 14th Amendment. People born in most U.S. territories (e.g., Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, Guam) are citizens by statute. The roughly 55,000 residents of American Samoa, however, are in the lonely category of "non-citizen nationals," and apparently they're not too happy about it. They can become citizens only through the regular naturalization process.
http://opiniojuris.org/2012/07/13/american-samoans-want-us-citizenship/