“The results are based on aggregated data from more than 88,000 Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted in the first six months of 2014 — a time when the president averaged 43% job approval among all Americans. Gallup interviewed 552 Muslims and at least 1,700 respondents in every other religious group during this time.”
Muslims are the most supportive? The right wing is going to have a field day.
Looking at those numbers, you’d think the RWNJs had a point about Obama being a secret Muslim.
Either all those Muslims they polled are in on the secret, or they are watching O’Reilly, Beck and company and believe what they hear.
Or maybe they feel that Obama really is in their corner even if he’s not one of them. That would seem to be a triumph of hope over reason, as I see it.
It’s more likely because the right appears to openly target them for aggression, such that anyone else is fantastically better by comparison.
The Mormon numbers are eye-popping. Do you suppose that is outright racism, or just excessive general conservatism?
Atheists are in almost perfect lockstep with Jews?
Gallup has a long-earned reputation for a pro-Christian bias; that second graph, separating Muslims, Jews, and non-believers from “All Americans”, adds another data point to that conclusion.
It’s almost like there’s something about having the word Christ” in your religion’s name that skews your view of reality.
This 2011 Pew report shows similarly high approval of Obama’s presidency among Muslims. The interesting thing is that this approval is very much focused on Obama himself. American Muslims lean Democratic anyway, of course, but they’re much more favorable toward Obama than toward the Democratic party in general, and they supported Obama much more strongly in 2008 than Kerry in 2004.
I haven’t seen any actual surveys trying to explain Obama’s personal popularity among Muslims, but several (non-crazy) reasons have been suggested here and there:
1. American Muslims are disproportionately likely to belong to several demographics which are particularly favorable toward Obama: liberals, young adults, and residents of blue states and urban areas.
2. Most American Muslims are first- or second-generation immigrants, and see Obama as sharing their personal background and understanding their needs–at least as much as anyone who could plausibly become president in the foreseeable future. (They do not tend to believe he’s Muslim himself, though, as far as I can see.)
3. Almost half of native-born American Muslims are black, and Obama is of course particularly popular among African Americans.
4. The (accurately) perceived hostility of the Republican party to Muslims and their issues makes American Muslims more willing to forgive Obama for policies that would otherwise alienate them from him, e.g. drone strikes and Guantanamo. They see it as politically impossible for Obama to govern more progressively on these issues even if he wanted to.
@Pierce R. Butler – July 13, 2014 at 8:11 am (UTC -6)
I guess I’m not surprised. If you think about it, in the USA atheists & Jews are in a similar space. Both of us are often middle class, and we’re both pretty well integrated into the mainstream. In both cases it is mostly extremists that give us actual problems. Neither of us is exactly mainstream, but in most US subcultures there is room for us – a room apart, as it were.