With the Occupy Wall Street movement growing in numbers and spreading across the country, social scientists are working on compiling the demographic data to find out who is participating in the protests and supporting them. The results are quite interesting.
Survey One: Visitors to Occupy Wall Street Website
The first survey, the results of which appear in an academic paper written by Héctor Codero-Guzmán, PhD, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), used visitors to the Occupy Wall Street movement’s website (www.occupywallst.org) on October 5th as its sample size. The paper was published online on the Occupy Wall Street website on Wednesday.
Politically independent
Among other striking findings, Codero-Guzmán discovered that 70 percent of the survey’s 1,619 respondents identified as politically independent, far-and-away the vast majority, compared to 27.3% Democrats and 2.4% self-identified Republicans…Other findings in the paper include:
Participation level: Relatively weak
Less than a quarter of the sample (24.2%) had participated in the Occupy Wall Street protests as of October 5, 2011. (But as Codero-Guzmán pointed out to TPM, the movement was still in its relative infancy at that stage.)Age varies widely
64.2% of respondents were younger than 34 years of age, but one in three respondents was over 35 and one in five was 45 or older.Wealth varies widely
A full 15.4% of the sample reported earning annual household income between $50,000 and $74,999. Another 13% of the sample reported over $75,000 , and 2% said they made over $150,000 annually, putting them in the top 10 percent of all American earners, according to theWall Street Journal’s calculator. That said, 47.5% of the sample said they earend less than $24,999 dollars a year and another quarter (24%) reported earning between $25,000 and $49,999 per year. A whopping 71.5% of the sample earns less than $50,000 per year.
The fact that few of the people who visited the website actually participated in the protests suggests that this study shouldn’t be taken too seriously. A lot of people may be visiting the website just to find out what’s going on, not because they are active participants or supporters of those protests. Here’s the second one:
Survey Two: Face-to-Face With Protesters
The other demographic survey of the movementwas an in-person questionnaire of some 198 protesters on the ground in Zuccotti Square, conducted by Fox News analyst Douglas Schoen’s polling outfit on October 10th and 11th.The results were published online Tuesday and used to bolster a Wall Street Journal column by Schoen in which he maintained “the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.”
Still, a closer examination of the results of Schoen’s survey by The Wall Street Journal’s Aaron Rutkoff on Wednesday revealed some findings that Schoen glossed over or misconstrued to further his own perspective…
Age varies widely
As Rutfkoff explained: “While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older,” roughly coinciding with Cordero-Guzmán’s findings.Some employment, but overall difficulty finding work
When it came to employment, Rutfkoff explained that “33%… are struggling in the labor market. That percentage is double the U.S. Labor Department’s broader measure of unemployment, which accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs.” …And although Schoen’s column maintained that “An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008,” his survey doesn’t exactly support that assertion. As Rutkoff found, ” according to the survey data, just 56% of protesters voted in 2008, and of those 74% voted for Obama. Crunching the numbers, it would appear that only 42% of the Zuccotti Park crowd has ever cast a presidential ballot for Obama.” Another 35 percent reported that they “somewhat approved” of President Obama’s job performance while 24 percent “somewhat disapproved” and 27 percent “strong disapproved.”
It will be interesting to see similar research done on some of the local gatherings going on outside of NYC. Over time, the methods used to collect the data will get better and we’ll get a more accurate picture of the situation. All of this plays against the right’s attempts to portray the OWS protesters as just a bunch of dirty hippies beating bongos and smoking pot while sponging off society.
And of course, if they can find anyone who ever even read a report on a protest who might have once met someone who worked for a group that received funding from a group that receives funding from Soros, they say “A ha, look who’s behind the whole thing!” But the folks out there protesting don’t know a damn thing about Soros. They’re out there because they’re angry and frustrated. And they should be.
14 comments
1 ping
Skip to comment form ↓
Michael Heath
October 26, 2011 at 9:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Why should Americans take them seriously if only a slight majority bother to vote? This reminds me of the anecdotal video interviews done at Jon Stewart’s rally, party-on but actually register and vote? Too hard . . .
The left continues to reveal a base whose ignorance or ambivalence to antipathy in actually doing what it takes to win a political fight remains frustratingly high.
cactusren
October 26, 2011 at 10:22 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While I generally agree with this statement, 56% of people voting is actually a perfect representation of what happened in 2008. Even in presidential elections, it’s common for barely over 50% of eligible voters to turn up in the US. (citation: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html).
So this just shows that this is a normal group of American adults, rather than people have been politically active in the past.
cactusren
October 26, 2011 at 10:45 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Also, given that 49% of people are in the 18-29 age bracket, there’s a fair number of people protesting who simply weren’t old enough to vote in the last election. If we assume that those 49% of people’s ages are distributed evenly across the age bracket (I know that’s probably not correct, but it will do for a simple estimation…), then about 4% of people are 18, 4% are 19, etc. That means roughly 12% of the people at OWS couldn’t vote in the last election. If true, that means that among people who were eligible to vote, people who are now at OWS are more likely to have voted than the average american.
That said, it’s still pathetic that only half of the american people participate in their democracy, but at least the OWS crowd is a bit ahead of the curve.
Fred Mounts
October 26, 2011 at 11:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think more people would vote if they could actually feel some difference in their lives when one party or the other is elected. For most people, I think for the most part they feel like they’re crushed ants no matter which party wins, so why bother? I vote, but I’ve yet to find a politician that gives a rats ass about what anyone but the money interests want.
Dennis N
October 26, 2011 at 11:50 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Elizabeth Warren?
thelatinone
October 26, 2011 at 12:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But it shows who’s interested in looking for information as you point out in the next sentence. The survey is not useless because it is likely a self-selected sample of people who are interested in knowing more about the movement from the movement’s perspective. Moreover, one table shows that 92% of the respondents “agree” or “somewhat agree” with the phrase “I support the Occupy Wall Street protests.”
What I find interesting is the proportion of independents. While I’ve read comparisons to the Tea party of OWS as a mirror image, this suggests the comparison is wrong. The Tea Party was always more partisan than OWS, meaning that the Tea party had a larger share of self-identified Republicans than OWS share of Democrats.
I think there lies the eventual success of OWS. The Tea Party was a bunch of middle-aged partisans who went out and voted. Independents have lower levels of turnout, and in states with closed primaries, they can’t have the effect on Democratic nominations that the Tea Party had in the GOP.
Area Man
October 26, 2011 at 12:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I actually had to look this up, and it is exactly 56.8%. I could’ve sworn it was higher.
As pathetic as this is, you’d think that the OWS protestors, who are politically fed-up and have the motivation to do something about it, would vote at a much higher rate than average. Or at least you’d hope that now they’d recognize the need to use what political power they have. But it doesn’t appear that way. They seem more inclined to complain that the whole game is rigged, which is precisely the attitude that… leads to the game being rigged. The reason politicians don’t care about the bottom half is because they don’t donate to campaigns and they don’t vote, so what’s the point of even listening to them?
Area Man
October 26, 2011 at 12:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yes, dangerously out of touch! Their radical agenda is shared by only a small majority of Americans.
Jadehawk, cascadeuse féministe
October 26, 2011 at 1:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
oh, they care alright. They care enough to have spent the last year or so making it exceedingly difficult for the poor to vote; apparently even the low percentages of the young and the poor who have votes were already too much for some politicians
juice
October 26, 2011 at 2:37 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Show me somebody worth voting for and I’ll vote for them.
Bronze Dog
October 26, 2011 at 3:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In my case, the vicious cycle gets compounded by media and party attention being directed towards politicians I’d vote against, rather than directing dissatisfied voters to alternatives they could look up. The act of going into the polling place and filling out the form isn’t the problem, it’s knowing whose name to write in.
Meanwhile:
In my search bar, now.
Michael Heath
October 26, 2011 at 7:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Fred Mount:
My first experience voting was in 1978 when I was 18. One of the items being voted on in Michigan that year was a proposal to change the drinking age from 18 to 21. The amendment won; largely due to the as always relatively large turn-out for older people and the always low turn-out for younger people.
Tea Partiers vote, younger people do not vote at nearly the same rate with few exceptions. If OWS wants to effect change, they also have to turn-out the vote, including that of their own active participants. I hope they’re successful; if historical trends hold they won’t be.
Michael Heath
October 26, 2011 at 7:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
juice:
No one wins on offense alone; in fact defense is often the key to ultimately succeeding. In politics Exhibit A illustrating this truism would be how conservatives kick both liberal and centrist ass when it comes to judicial appointments to the federal courts.
Aquaria
October 27, 2011 at 4:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Why should Americans take them seriously if only a slight majority bother to vote? This reminds me of the anecdotal video interviews done at Jon Stewart’s rally, party-on but actually register and vote?
They’re merely reflecting the millions of apathetic Americans who haven’t been voting for decades. It was easy to let voting go when they were fat dumb and happy. It’s only now that some of them are hurting badly enough, and they’re finally waking up.
You’ve had decades to get miffed about it. Why do it now?
Besides, this is a youthful movement. Let’s see the breakdown of under 30 crowd, to see how much of that 49% is under 21. It’s not exactly their fault that they weren’t old enough to vote in 2008, you know.
Latina Natalia Spice
November 16, 2011 at 11:22 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Latina Natalia Spice…
[...]Who Are the Occupy Wall Street Protesters? | Dispatches from the Culture Wars[...]…