Controversy Over the Term ‘Latinx’: Public Opinion Context

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Labels matter, and nowhere have we seen this exemplified more throughout the centuries than in controversies over names used to describe racial and ethnic groups. …

One of the central threads in critiques of the use of “Latinx” is evidence measuring the opinions of rank-and-file Hispanic Americans themselves. These data show that relatively few Hispanic adults have even heard of the term, and very few indicate an interest in using it to describe their ethnicity. …

Overall, to the extent there is a controversy, it is apparently not so much generated from the bottom up — that is, discontent in the ranks of Hispanic Americans over the labels used to describe them — but rather a controversy developed by thought leaders and activists from the top down. CONTINUED

Frank Newport, Gallup

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Do Republicans really believe Trump won the 2020 election? Our research suggests that they do.

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All credible evidence tells us that the 2020 election was very secure. … Nevertheless, the vast majority of Republican voters say they agree with Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen. In our most recent University of Massachusetts at Amherst poll, fielded online Dec. 14-20 by YouGov among a nationally representative sample of the U.S. voting-age population, only 21 percent of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate. …

Some observers wonder whether these beliefs are genuine or just an example of expressive responding, a term social scientists use to mean respondents are using a survey item to register a feeling rather than express a real belief. …

To further explore how genuinely Republicans believe the “big lie,” we embedded a list experiment in our December UMass Poll. CONTINUED

Lane Cuthbert & Alexander Theodoridis (U. of Massachusetts Amherst), Monkey Cage

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Americans’ faith in election integrity drops

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America’s faith in the integrity of the election system remains shaken by the events of Jan. 6, with only 20% of the public saying it’s very confident about the system, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds. This is a significant drop from 37% in an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in the days after the insurrection last year. …

The ABC/Ipsos poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, also found that when asked to mention one word to describe what happened on Jan. 6, an overwhelming majority of Americans (68%) responded with a critical description. CONTINUED

Brittany Shepherd, ABC News

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Free Expression in America Post-2020

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Free expression and the freedom of speech are cornerstones of American democracy. Yet the interpretation of the First Amendment continues to be a flashpoint in the 21st century as the nation debates how to apply these rights to our society.

For the 2021 “Free Expression in America Post-2020” report, Knight Foundation commissioned Ipsos to conduct a survey with a nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 American adults, including an additional sample of 1,000 undergraduate college students. The Knight Foundation-Ipsos study provides a comprehensive look at American attitudes toward freedom of speech in a post-2020 environment, building on Knight Foundation’s long-standing work studying free speech views among students since 2004. CONTINUED

Knight Foundation

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Would Americans ever support a coup? 40 percent now say yes.

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… For over two decades, our research team, LAPOP Lab at Vanderbilt University, has been studying democratic attitudes and values across the Americas, using nationally representative surveys that we field every other year. The U.S. survey uses online interviews with Web-based national samples of 1,500 respondents.

Since 2010, the survey has asked a question that reads, “Some people say that under some circumstances it would be justified for the military of this country to take power by a coup d’etat (military coup). In your opinion would a military coup be justified when there is a lot of corruption?” …

The share of Americans willing to tolerate a coup increased from 28 percent in 2017 to 40 percent in 2021. That’s a 43 percent increase, and the highest rate we’ve seen in the United States since we began asking the question more than a decade ago. It’s also one of the largest increases we’ve seen in this measure across the Americas. CONTINUED

Noam Lupu, Luke Plutowski & Elizabeth J. Zechmeister (Vanderbilt), Monkey Cage

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Washington State: Economy is top legislative concern for 2022

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For the first time in eight years, the economy tops the list of issues Washington voters want the Legislature to address in 2022, eclipsing homelessness and COVID-19 as the leading concerns statewide, according to a new Crosscut/Elway Poll.

The new poll, released Thursday, asked 400 registered voters an open-ended question about what topics state legislators should focus on when they convene for a new session next week. Nearly a third of respondents — 32% — named economic issues as the most important for the Legislature to tackle. CONTINUED

Melissa Santos, Crosscut

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