Baird's CMC -- Blog

“It doesn’t feel like my country anymore” one participant told me after a recent meeting in California. It’s a common sentiment amongst the liberal élite on the East and West coasts. So many enquired about Canadian citizenship after the last presidential election that one Canadian government website crashed. Even Republicans in New York and California are worried that it’s not just about lower taxes and a more pro-corporate foreign policy any longer. The élite think by shouting louder or producing a bit more data in the opinion-leading press that the rest of the country will come back to its senses. In fact, America is probably entering one of those periods where populist opinion dominates. Many of those who love democracy in the abstract may be a bit less keen on this manifestation of it.

When I was at university in Alabama almost thirty years ago (before you ask, it’s a long story about how a British 20 year-old ended up with a degree from Troy, Alabama), the crowd would erupt at the local discotheque every time they played the Charlie Daniels Band singing “be proud you’re a rebel, the South’s gonna do it again”. It seemed unlikely then. Jimmy Carter was in the White House but he was there despite being a Southerner not because he was one: he was one of the few white politicians who had not been tainted by collaboration with the segregationists. Southern Republicans were still a rare breed (the very odd Jeremiah Denton was only allowed to run for the US Senate from Alabama because he seemed so unlikely to win; when he actually did, one state Republican leader turned to a colleague and asked “my God, what have we done”). George Wallace was still the governor (and would be – on and off – for another decade) but the Dixiecrat wave looked like the end of something rather than a start.

Today the values of the South have become the values of most of the Red States (those that the TV networks colour red every time the Republicans carry them). Almost half of Americans say they accept the Biblical account of creation but only about a third accept evolution. Many more Americans describe themselves as “conservative” than anything else. The levels of church membership and attendance nationwide are higher than they were in the last century.

From New York or San Francisco, it’s easy to caricature these views. Closer evaluation of what evangelicals and, even more, Catholics think shows a wide range of views. The Pew Forum recently invited Rick Warren, Senior Pastor and Founder of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, California to a forum for journalists. Saddleback is one of the 20,000 member mega churches that so terrify dinner parties from Baltimore to Seattle. Warren said, “There is a difference between ‘evangelicalism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘the religious right.” And people use them like they are synonyms. They are not – they are very, very different. I am an evangelical. I'm not a member of the religious right and I'm not a fundamentalist.” He also predicted a third great religious awakening in America (I really commend the whole talk to anyone interested in the influence of faith on American politics and life: http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=80). Jim Wallis and the Sojourners movement show what left-wing evangelicals sound like and many who are not so left wing have built on his ideas that evangelicals should care about issues such as il health and poverty. The very noisy evangelical anti-war movement recently upset a carefully staged speech by President Bush to the previously-conservative Calvin College.

Warren’s most astonishing comment was an acknowledgement of the class basis of the new American politics. “In fact, if I were building a political majority in this country, I'd start sort of where Gary Bauer is substantively. I'd take socially conservative and economically liberal, and I think that's a lower-middle-class majority in the making, which is the opposite of what you hear, that a party should be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. I think that's not the way to build a majority.” Of course, this was exactly what the Dixiecrats did – spend on the needs of poor whites whilst relying on fear of change to avoid the kind of real social and economic change which the progressives had threatened in the 1890s.

For those who think that this will all pass soon, Warren has a fascinating note on demographics, “one of my favorite statistics from this last election was that George Bush carried 22 of the 23 states with the highest white fertility rates and John Kerry carried the 17 states with the lowest fertility rates. And that's really not about fertility; that's about church attendance. People who attend church have more babies than people who don't.”

If this new majority is here to stay, all of us will have to think about how to influence them. A recent poll from a different arm of the multi-tentacled Pew centres suggests that very few conservatives believe anything they see on television or read in mainstream media (only 24% of conservatives even believe the very right-wing Fox News). The left-wing evangelicals are just as sceptical albeit for different reasons.

There are two keys to reaching the new majority. The first focuses on networks – traditional and new media. The influence of churches and affinity groups is enormous and amplified by new media opportunities from blogs and podcasts to, relatively, old-fashioned chatrooms. I’m not convinced that the new majority think that right-wing talkradio is any more reliable than Fox or CNN but they do believe people they have established relationships with whether in house groups or on electronic forums.

None of the “how to” matters if the vocabulary isn’t right. For many years, the language of policy has been the language of the coastal élites. To win over the new majority, it needs to be the language of church and community.

This may, of course, all be an elaborate justification for why I made the right decision by going to Troy University instead of taking up my place at Oxford but it might just be the Charlie Daniels prophecy coming true.

If you believe the opinion polls, George Bush is more unpopular than any president since polling started: he has a lower approval rating than John F. Kennedy just after the Bay of Pigs; lower than Lyndon Johnson at the nadir of the Vietnam war; lower than Jimmy Carter after a year of captivity for the US hostages in Iran; lower even than Richard Nixon on the eve of his resignation. Admittedly the others may have had great accomplishments that reinforced their positive ratings – JFK had Camelot, LBJ had the Civil Rights Act, Nixon had peace in Vietnam and the opening to China; Carter had his evident decency and honesty (and was the first Southerner to hold the White House since the Civil War which made a chunk of the Old South loathe to turn on him). Admittedly, Iraq has been a disaster and the half-truths which led to war are looking more and more like quarter-truths by the week. But is Bush really that disliked?

A part of the truth is probably that all of us have become more and more sophisticated about how we deal with market researchers of all kinds and especially about how we send messages through political pollsters. Even in the late 70s, when Carter was in the White House, people were much more naïve: if someone in a shopping mall (remember telephone samples were still seen as a bit unreliable) asked if you approved of the President’s performance, you were more inclined to weigh things and say whether on balance you really did or did not. Today, the respondents know what the headlines will look like. They know that only a 1,000 people are being questioned and that their answer will help send a message which will be on CNN and Fox News within 24 hours.

Bill Clinton was not the most popular president in recent history in the week where his adultery became common knowledge: it was just that, on balance, people did not want him to resign. Poll respondents were sophisticated enough to know that “approve” would mean a rejection of the calls for impeachment; “disapprove” would egg on Kenneth Starr and the Republicans in the Senate. George W. Bush is not the most unpopular president ever: the respondents know that “disapprove” ratches up the pressure for a quick end to the Iraqi adventure and discourages any other neo-con initiatives. It does not necessarily mean that most would even vote Democrat (as other polls show).

The same phenomenon is true in other countries. The Pew Research Center for People and the Press recently reported growing hostility towards America and growing approval ratings for Osama Bin Laden in some Moslem countries. Quite apart from serious methodological problems in the research, the analysis was misleading. The standardised polling questions did not ask about the invasion of Iraq or American threats to Iran. Even in Pakistan and the Middle East, respondents know that admitting to some admiration for Osama is a way of expressing opposition to the war in Iraq and to US policy in the Middle East.

In the commercial world, the analysis of market research data still ignores this inclination of respondents to use research to send messages. What ever I really think of mango-flavoured yoghourt, I may well claim to detest it if I think that admitting to be willing to try it will reduce the shelf space allocated to the flavours I like at the moment.