Apropos of my post yesterday, a poll by the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication looks at the relationship between support for voter ID laws and racial resentment.
The basic breakdown, both by self-identified ideology and self-identified party ID, is as follows:
One thing that immediately leaps out, and which is not a surprise, Republicans/conservatives favor the laws at much higher rates than do Democrats/liberals. There is still,
We can also see that there is a clearly linkage between racial resentment and support for the law. This can most readily be seen if we compare Democrats and liberals with low and high resentment levels. There is a difference for Republicans and liberals, but since support is so high in those groups to begin with, it is less dramatic a difference.
If you look at the write-up on the study, you can see that the questions asked to determine resentment they are focused basically on general attitudes towards affirmative action or similar policies.
Of course, this doesn’t really tell us the exact interaction between these two topics. That is, it doesn’t tell us if racial resentment leads to support of voter ID laws. However, I think it does suggest more evidence that race is part of this equation. Further, if one is already of the opinion (to used one of the questions) that “I resent any special considerations that Africans Americans receive because it’s unfair to other Americans” then it seems likely that one would find arguments about how difficult it may be for some African Americans to obtain IDs to be unpersuasive, and might, in fact, spark more resentment.
