Gays Elected Obama?

Gay people elected Obama.  How's that for a provocative lede?  You doubt me? Check out these fun stats, based on exit poll data.  Respondents were asked: Are you gay, lesbian or bisexual?

Yes   5%
No  95%

No surprise above in how many gay or non-gay voters were found in the electorate this week.  But check out the numbers below.

                           Yes, Gay    No, Not
Voted Obama           76%          22%
Voted Romney          49%         49%

In other words, among voters who said they weren't gay, it's a tie.  Among voters who said they were, Obama overwhelmed Romney.

Oh my, if Rush Limbaugh sees this, he'll have a fit.  Forget I mentioned it.

And I should point out that it's likely many of these votes were in states that were already solid Obama in the first place.

Knowing Iraq

In a new report:

Public awareness of the number of American military fatalities in Iraq has declined sharply since last August. Today, just 28% of adults are able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war. As of March 10, the Department of Defense had confirmed the deaths of 3,974 U.S. military personnel in Iraq.

The proportion of people who could correctly name the number of military fatalities in Iraq has been as high as 55% but has never been as low as it is now. Iraq has left the front page, it's left the top of the newscast. We have Obamillary, we have the economy. Hell, we have March Madness.

Republicans dropped from 53% to 26% correct. Democrats dropped from 49% to 30%. In an odd twist, the older you were, the greater the drop in knowledge about military deaths. No idea why. The same huge drop is seen among higher educated folks than those of less education, probably in part because the less educated had a lower number to begin with. Basement effect.

The good news is, 84% know that Oprah supports Obama. That's news you can use.

Knowledge vs Emotion

In social science PhDweebdom, we call emotion "affect" just to confuse budding grammarians who struggle with the difference between effect and affect. The relationships between cognition (stuff you know), affect (stuff you feel) and motivation (what moves ya to do something) are complex, baffling, and altogether enough to drive one crazy.

So, why bother?

In my continuing saga of studies I'd like to see, I would love to know what people "know" about Obama versus what they "feel" about him, and which better predicts support. I have no partisan issue here, but I suspect affect plays a bigger role in support than does cognition. I'm not suggesting Obama supporters don't think, I'm just wondering whether emotion is a key factor, overwhelming cognition. I suspect it is.

In general, other than party identification, key factors in who you vote for at the presidential level are competence and integrity. Some lean one way, some lean the other. And individual elections can frame the race around one versus the other. A good example is 1976 and Jimmy Carter, a post-Watergate election in which integrity became the main factor. How people decide these two is a fascinating issue, and it's my non-scholarly sense that Democrats seem to lean more on competence and Republicans seem to lean more on integrity -- but that's more of a gut feeling than one based on hard data.

A fun test would be asking Democrats where they stand on issues, using the NES traditional 7-point scale, and then asking them to place Obama and Clinton on the same scale, and see where they fall. There's a neat web site that kinda does this, asking you a lot of issue questions and then telling you who you should support, the candidate most fitting your stance.

Didn't work at all for me, at least at the moment. Clearly I'm not cognitive.

Studies I'd Like To See

We have the presidential election, so here are some studies I'd like to see done.

• Assuming Obama is the Democratic nominee, a study of "knowledge" about him that focuses more on misinformation than actual fact. For example, who thinks he is secretly a Muslim and what media do they consume, if any? Internet? Talk radio?
• Ditto on McCain, especially the notion floating around that he caved to torture while being held in Vietnam.
• Which areas of "knowledge" (from misinformation to actual information) best predict vote choice.
• Trust in government. This is an interest of mine and I'm doing some work at the moment on this topic. Trust has eroded of late. Will this year see a blip up? And what are the predictors and consequences of such trust?
• Conservative Christians ... where do they go? I'd love to see some in-depth work done on what they learned and how they learned about this campaign, probably through focus groups and in-depth interviews. They are conflicted given the GOP candidate isn't truly a good fit. Reminds me of the old cross-pressure research.
• Media fragmentation. Another favorite topic of mine, so this time where are people learning about the campaign. As I've said earlier, I suspect advertising to play a greater role than ever before as people flee news for entertainment-oriented fare. Ads can still reach those folks. Knowledge -> Turnout.

I'm sure I'll think of others, but every election is a moment ripe for research ideas. I've got my own plans, some of which resemble those above, but I hope to see other people doing neat stuff.