Via Jamelle Bouie we learn that not everyone’s done with the Lost Cause:
DC Tea Partier, January 2010 (my photo, available under Creative Commons license)
In the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Tuesday, roughly one in four Americans said they sympathize more with the Confederacy than the Union, a figure that rises to nearly four in ten among white Southerners. [...] When broken down by political party, most Democrats said southern states seceded over slavery, independents were split and most Republicans said slavery was not the main reason that Confederate states left the Union.
Bouie deems the partisan gap unsurprising based on the demographics of the GOP, but I do think it’s at least a little noteworthy since Republicans (with their more upscale demographics) are usually better-informed about factual questions than Democrats.
I also think the white southerners figure needs to be put in the context of the fact that “the south” as a distinctive cultural region is shrinking. My retired Jewish liberal New Yorker grandparents in south Florida aren’t really southern nor are my aunt and uncle in Arlington. Obviously you can’t pull off a methodologically rigorous survey of which people are and aren’t real southerners, so these measures are the best we can get, but it’s in effect an undercount of the volume of pro-confederate sentiments among culturally southern people.
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