‘Birthers,’ Polls and Public Ignorance

Ross Douthat
NYT

There’s a new poll out, from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes, showing that 24 percent of Americans don’t think that Barack Obama was born in the United States. On MSNBC last night, Chris Hayes asked me about it, and I tried to suggest that polls like this should be taken with a large grain of salt — both because Americans will happily express all kinds of outlandish opinions to a pollster without necessarily meaning much by them (does almost half the public really believe in U.F.O.s, at least in any serious way? I’m skeptical …), and because public ignorance is vast and deep enough to account for a good-sized chunk of any apparently-scary fringe opinion. For instance, I suggested that a lot of respondents probably don’t know that birthright citizenship is a requirement for the presidency, and that some respondents may not even be aware that Obama’s birthplace, Hawaii, is actually one of the 50 states.

Mark Finkelstein of the ever-vigilant Newsbusters pounced on this last comment, accusing me of pandering to liberals by suggesting that conservatives who “question Barack Obama’s place of birth are too dense to realize that Hawaii is a state of the union.” I’m not entirely clear on why Newsbusters feels compelled to defend the honor of the birther movement, but no, I don’t think that people who tell pollsters that Obama was born outside the United States are necessarily “dense.” Some of them are quite intelligent: Conspiracy theories are generally the province of people who are high on I.Q. and low on common sense, and the more baroque narratives surrounding Obama’s birth certificate are no exception, I’m sure. Others, meanwhile, just haven’t bothered to learn that much about the composition of the United States. Here’s what Public Policy Polling found out, for instance, when they drilled down to find out where “birthers” believe Obama was really born:

62 percent of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24 percent think he was not and 14 percent are unsure.

10 percent of the country thinks that he was born in Indonesia, 7 percent think he was born in Kenya, and 1 percent think he was born in the Philippines.

That leaves 20 percent, which includes at least some people who correctly believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but who don’t consider Hawaii to be part of the United States. You read that right — 6 percent of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4 percent are unsure.

(More here.)