IBISWorld, a market and industry research firm, states that 20 industries in seven sectors over the next five years “will benefit most from a growing Hispanic population in the United States.”

The report adds:

• Hispanic buying power will total $1.1 trillion in 2011, or about 9.5 percent of the U.S. total.
• Over the next five years, the nation’s buying power is projected to grow 27.5 percent to $14.7 trillion, while that of the Hispanic population is forecast to grow 48.1 percent to $1.6 trillion.
• Hispanic buying power will have an impact on the food, retail, automotive and entertainment and media industries

The IBIS report adds that “Hispanics comprise a quickly growing share of the higher-education sector, leading enrollment growth among all racial groups over the past five years.”

It also indicates that “soaring tuition costs, however, remain a limiting factor. As a result, Hispanics have also led strong growth in community college and trade and technical school enrollment.”

A Pew Hispanic Center (.pdf) report issued in late August indicates that “from 2009 to 2010, the number of Hispanic young adults enrolled in college grew by 349,000, compared with an increase of 88,000 young blacks and 43,000 young Asian Americans and a decrease of 320,000 young non-Hispanic whites.”

The Pew report adds:

• Hispanics are not the largest minority group on the nation’s four-year college campuses.
• Although the college enrollment rate of young Hispanics was at a record high in 2010, black, Asian and white young adults continue to be more likely than young Hispanics to be enrolled in college.
• Of all young Hispanics who were attending college in October 2010, some 46 percent were at a two-year college and 54 percent were at a four-year college. By contrast, among young white college students, 73 percent were enrolled in a four-year college, as were 78 percent of young Asian college students and 63 percent of young black college students.

The Pew Hispanic report adds that, despite narrowing the college enrollment gap, “Hispanic young adults continue to be the least educated major racial or ethnic group in terms of completion of a bachelor’s degree.”

In November 2010, the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia reported that “although the Great Recession has hit Hispanics and Asians particularly hard, their buying power is expected to grow rapidly over the next several years.”

Despite this growth a report issued by the Pew Research Center indicates that “in Florida median home prices dropped 38 percent between the end of 2005 and the end of 2009. That means that, along with Arizona, California, Michigan and Nevada, the median drop in household wealth for Florida Hispanics was around 88 percent.”

The Pew report also adds that “the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites.” Household wealth among Hispanics fell 66 percent, from more than $18,000 in 2005 to a little more than $6,000 in 2009, while black households saw a 53 percent decrease and white households a 16 percent fall in household wealth.

The Miami Herald reports that “Katherine Archuleta, the political director for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, is coming to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and Tampa from Friday to Sunday. She’ll meet with Democratic elected officials and the grassroots Obama leaders known as the Fall Fellows, who help recruit volunteers and man phone banks. At the same time, Vice President Joe Biden travels to Miami Beach to raise campaign cash.”

According to the Herald, the Obama reelection campaign is focusing on Hispanics. The Pew Research Center data shows that Hispanic voters supported Obama over GOP presidential candidate John McCain “by a margin of more than two-to-one in the 2008 presidential election.”

A Gallup poll issued early this month indicates that Obama “earned the lowest monthly job approval rating of his presidency to date in August, with 41% of U.S. adults approving of his overall job performance, down from 44% in July. He also received term-low monthly job approval ratings from both Hispanics (48%) and whites (33%) and tied his lowest rating from blacks (84%).”

Gallup adds that “although Hispanics’ monthly approval of Obama dipped below 50% for the first time in August, more still approve than disapprove (48% vs. 37%) of his job performance.”

With the increasing trend of state legislatures imposing more restrictions on abortion — in some instances criminalizing the practice after 20 weeks — and many anti-abortion rights groups in the debate increasingly appealing to a younger demographic with an uptick in social-media-savvy, youth-led initiatives, the findings on the surface might appear surprising.

In 2009, Pew Research polling showed that 46 percent of Americans favored legal abortions in most or all cases, compared to 44 percent against — a pretty even split. In the summer of 2010, the field was more divided, with pro-abortion rights supporters tilting the balance in their favor with 50 percent versus 44 percent opposed to legalizing abortion in or all in most cases.

Unsurprisingly, the divide tends to run along party lines — 65 percent of Democrats favoring legal abortion versus 34 percent of Republicans against abortion. About 58 percent of independents said they favored legal abortion in all or most cases, according to the Pew survey.

Among Catholics, support for legal abortions has increased slightly: 52 percent, compared with 47 percent in 2010. Evangelical Protestants, at 64 percent, continue to the be the most opposed to legalized abortion than any other religious group.

Last year, a Gallup Poll showed that the views on abortion were shifting to the anti-abortion-rights side, with data demonstrating that 47 percent of Americans identified themselves as “pro-life” vs. 45 percent who identified as “pro-choice.” Notably, the Gallup Poll found that ideology among the 18-29 set had increased toward pro-choice, from 42 percent in 2007-2008 to 47 percent in 2009-2010.

A growing number say they’re “frustrated.” Other options — “basically content” and “don’t know” — remain statistically unchanged. #

Only 28 percent of those who say they agree with the tea party movement describe themselves as angry, down from 47 percent last year. #

Liberals and labor households are rallying around unions amid calls to strip public employees of collective bargaining and other rights in Florida, Wisconsin and elsewhere and ads condemning union protests, with a surge in members of those groups saying they have a “very favorable” view of organized labor. #

The full report (.pdf) notes: #

As the intensity of support for labor unions has grown in union households, overall favorability has remained about the same (69% in February, 73% now). #

There has been no corresponding shift in opinion among conservative Republicans or non-labor households. Very unfavorable views of labor are about the same as they were in February for these groups, as negative views of labor have become no more intense. #

Hat tip: Saint Petersblog. #

Overall, despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and Democrats to talk up the pernicious effects of anonymous spending on campaigns, it only seems to have registered for about a quarter of the population, while concerns about voter fraud or vote suppression only caught the attention of about one in five Americans. There’s also a slight partisan trend picked up by the Pew Survey in awareness of both topics — Democrats were slightly more aware of the anonymous spending issue, while Republicans were a good deal more tuned into reports of voter fraud or suppression. This follows naturally from the stated concerns of both parties; a part of me expected that partisan divide to be even bigger.

But one of the most interesting things the poll shows us is how Americans’ views of global warming have changed over time. The data show that between April 2008 and October 2009 — a period that included the passage of a cap-and-trade bill in the House and the beginning of debate on a similar bill in the Senate — the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming fell drastically. In April 2008, 71 percent of Americans believed the earth was warming; in October 2009 that number was 57 percent.

The poll gives us additional evidence that more Republicans than Democrats question climate science. About 79 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans believe the earth is warming. Among Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, just 23 percent say there is solid evidence of climate change.

What does this tell us? Well, for one, it shows that Republicans have been successful in raising doubts about climate science. And it shows that climate change has become increasingly politicized. For the vast majority of Republicans, and for even more Tea Partiers, climate skepticism has become a key component of their political identity.

The drop in concern about global warming has occurred in both parties, to varying degrees. In April 2008, 49 percent of Republicans said there was solid evidence of climate change; in October 2009, that number dropped to 35 percent. Among Democrats, there was a smaller decline, but a decline nonetheless, from 83 percent to 75 percent. Independents were affected the most, going from 75 percent to 53 percent.

These numbers say a lot about how politics affects the way Americans think about an issue. These sort of debates (cap-and-trade, gay marriage, etc.) may force Americans to develop opinions on things that they just don’t think about on a day-to-day basis. That leaves them vulnerable to outside influence, regardless of party. While the party divides still exist (Republicans tend to be more skeptical, Democrats tend to believe the science and independents are more easily swayed), it’s likely that opinions will continue to change.

And there’s another issue at play in many of these debates that often gets ignored: cost. One of the most common criticisms of cap-and-trade is that it will upend the economy and lead to higher electricity bills. During the House cap-and-trade debate, Republicans were not shy about raising these concerns. I’d wager that much of the change in opinion about the science has a lot to do with fears about the economics.

• The recession has, at some point, left one in three workers unemployed and more than half of workers unemployed or underemployed — with their hours cut or their status reduced to part-time, for instance.
• 95 percent of Americans believe the economy is still in a recession, though 41 percent believe it is starting to come out of the recession. Just 3 percent believe the recession is over. Whites and Republicans are more likely than other demographic groups to say the recession is still going on — though statistically, minorities and Democrats are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed.
• More than 60 percent of Americans say they have cut back their spending. And nearly a third say they will continue to spend less, even when the economy is comfortably out of the recession.
• One-third of adults say they are “not confident” they will have income, assets and housing to finance their retirement. Among workers in their 50s, nearly two-thirds say they will put off retirement because they need to keep working to stay afloat.
• A quarter of respondents say their children will have a worse standard of living than they do, up from 10 percent 10 years ago.

“If anything surprised me, it’s how many people have heard about this,” said Michael Dimock, an associate director at the Pew Research Center. “When we put the question in, we said to ourselves, well, Lou Dobbs has covered it, and it’s been discussed on the Internet. For 80 percent of people to have heard something about this is pretty high.”

Dimock told TWI that the survey’s sample was not large enough to find statistically significant breakdowns from one region of the country to the other, or to break the poll down between whites, blacks, and other minorities. The high number of Republicans who want “coverage,” said Dimock, does not necessarily mean that they’re all “birthers.” Instead, the number could be viewed as a screen for the persistent doubts of Obama’s political skeptics.

“It goes back to what we tracked last year, when we consistently found that 10 or 11 percent of Americans believed that he was Muslim,” said Dimock. “There is a core group of Americans who have never been comfortable with Barack Obama. A story like this sort of resonates with these folks. Oh! Maybe he isn’t one of us!”

iStockphoto

As the Obama administration moves forward with its green agenda, climate change concerns have been elevated to a top priority. Yet in the midst of the deepening economic crisis, public opinion appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A Gallup poll released last Wednesday found a six percent drop from last year in the number of people who are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, after that number had been increasing for the previous five years. It also showed that after a similar five-year climb, the percentage of respondents who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun had decreased by eight points over the past year. A record-high 16 percent of Americans now believe that global warming will never occur; in more than ten years of polling, no more than 11 percent of respondents had ever expressed this opinion.

The day after the poll was released, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading climate change skeptic, took to the Senate floor and celebrated the results as a triumph of information. “You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people,” he proclaimed. “Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm.”

Inhofe attributed the shift in public opinion to new studies from prominent scientists that he said contradicted the prevailing climate change arguments embraced by former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” he said.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

On the other side of the climate debate, the Center for American Progress’ Joseph Romm, an acting assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton and an influential environmental activist, also chalked the changing attitudes up to a change in propaganda, albeit with a different slant.

“Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply,” he wrote on his blog, Climate Progress. “That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.” While “the vast majority of scientists are consistently bad at messaging,” he explained, global warming skeptics have “never stopped their single-minded disinformation campaign.”

Yet public opinion experts have a different explanation for the poll results.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, argues that the economic downturn has trumped all other concerns. “In a time of economic crisis, people are less willing to focus on an issue like global warming because they see other, more pressing issues,” he said.

A similar phenomenon took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dimock explained. “In January 2002, a few months after 9/11, the public’s sense of priority on a whole host of important issues just fell through the floor,” he said. “They expected the government, almost to the exclusion of other important things, to focus on this issue.”

Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, published a comprehensive report in April 2008 that tracked polls on the environment and global warming over the past several decades. Her data showed that in the three years following the 9/11 attacks, fewer people said they were worried about global warming than in any other year in the past decade.

Similarly, she argues, the economic crisis has now pushed environmental considerations aside. “The economy is just swamping all other issues right now,” she said. “Nothing else comes close.”

According to Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental policy and public opinion at the University of Michigan, this trend fits into historical patterns. “It’s not unusual at all that when there are economic problems in the country, concerns about the environment drop off,” he said.

Pew Research Center (click to enlarge)

The current economic crisis, of course, is the most severe in decades, and the Gallup poll is not the first to show its effects on public attitudes toward climate change. Every January, Pew conducts a poll to assess people’s “top priorities” for the government to address. This year, global warming came out on the very bottom of the list.

“Out of the 19 things that we ask people to rank as priorities, it’s number 19,” said Dimock. Only 30 percent of respondents considered global warming a “top priority,” down from 38 percent in 2007 and 35 percent in 2008. Other non-economic concerns likewise tumbled down people’s list of priorities, including crime, immigration and “protecting the environment” generally.

While the economy is likely the leading cause of reduced concern about global warming, these experts also posit a number of other possible explanations. Bowman and Mohai argue that Americans tend to feel less worried about a problem when they believe that the government is addressing it. In this case, confidence in President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership to tackle global warming has led people to feel less personally worried about the issue. “During Republican administrations, people’s concerns about the environment go up, and during Democratic administrations they go down,” said Mohai.

Bowman’s 2008 study backs up this claim. In every poll she recorded since 1971, people have had greater confidence in the Democratic Party to protect the environment. In the latest poll included in her study, a February 2008 Pew poll, 65 percent of respondents expressed greater confidence in Democrats on this issue, compared to just 21 percent for Republicans.

Dimock, on the other hand, points to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as a possible complement to the economic causes of the change in public opinion. He hypothesizes that as a highly polarizing figure, Gore may have solidified Democratic support for his environmental agenda while turning off some Republicans and independents. “You can imagine how, with people feeling like Al Gore was lecturing them on global warming, so to speak, they might have some sort of backlash, because it was no longer coming from a neutral source. It was coming from a political source.”

Nonetheless, Dimock believes that the struggling economy is far and away the primary cause of the shift in public opinion. “The 800-pound gorilla is this economic crisis,” he said.

Inhofe’s claim that the change stems from the propagation of new scientific studies that cast doubt on man-made global warming theories garnered little support from these experts. “If that is indeed happening, I haven’t seen it on the news, and I follow it pretty closely,” said Mohai.

So what might cause Americans to renew their global warming concerns? In the lingo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it’s the economy, stupid.

“If and when people feel more comfortable about the economy turning around, their focus can turn to other issues,” said Dimock.

Just as President Obama has tied his economic agenda to an environmental one, it appears that Americans’ global warming concerns will rise and fall with their 401(k)s.