Beachgoers cool off during the Southern California heat wave in September in Huntington Beach, Calif. (Chris Carlson/Associated Press)
538’s Harry Enten recently wrote about a “race gap” in opinions about global warming. According to Enten, Pew survey data from 2007 through 2014 revealed that non-whites were more likely to say that global warming is “a top priority for Congress and the president.” Even among self-identified Democrats, non-whites were more likely to consider global warming a top priority. Enten concluded:
It seems clear from the polling that whites are more skeptical of the need for government intervention on global warming than non-whites. If the leaders of the climate-change movement are overwhelmingly white, then they are not representative of the larger the slice of the public most sympathetic to their cause.
That conclusion certainly challenges conventional wisdom about which kinds of people care more about the environment and global warming. My hunch was that non-whites were more inclined to rank any issue as a top priority. And that is what seems to be true.
Here is some data on 11 issues, including global warming and 10 others that Pew asked on one version of its survey. (Pew divided all 21 questions about priorities across two separate versions of the survey, presumably to avoid respondent fatigue.) The issues are sorted in order of the difference between whites and the average of blacks and Hispanics.
For 10 of the 11 issues, both blacks and Hispanics were more likely to say it is a top priority for the government. For only one issue, Social Security, was a non-white group — Hispanics, in this case — less likely than whites to indicate that the issue was a priority. Even then, the difference was just five percentage points.
The difference between blacks and whites is consistent and often substantial. Blacks were more likely than white respondents to say that all 11 issues were a top priority. For six issues, the gap was at least 20 points. Only for the economy, where most respondents (81 percent) said it was a top priority, was there a single-digit gap.
I also obtained Pew data from 2008, 2010 and 2012 from Enten to make sure the 2014 results were not an outlier. The same pattern emerged in earlier years as well. With only three exceptions, black respondents were more likely to say that every issue was a top priority. Moreover, these racial differences persisted even after accounting for education, income and overall support for or opposition to activist government.
The gap might originate in minority group consciousness. Non-whites, and blacks in particular, may believe that they disproportionately bear the burden if issues are not dealt with effectively, and so more of them advocate to make these issues a priority. Another possibility is that non-whites simply employ systematically different standards when answering this kind of survey question. If so, then any racial gaps may simply be a byproduct of the survey interview.
So, do non-whites place a higher priority on global warming? Yes, but I am skeptical that we should take that result at face value. It seems more important to explain why non-whites, blacks especially, are more likely to say that any issue is a top priority.