David A. Patten, Newsmax, June 3, 2009
Voters disagree with Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s controversial ruling in the New Haven firefighters’ reverse-discrimination case by more than three-to-one, a new poll shows.
Voters also strongly oppose using affirmative action programs to increase diversity, according to the Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday morning.
“If you look at the data,” Quinnipiac Assistant Director Peter Brown tells Newsmax, “what’s most interesting is how large their objection is for diversity being a reason for affirmative action. The numbers are staggeringly negative.”
In an unusual survey of 3,100 voters—most national polls rely on about 1,200 respondents—voters by 71 to 19 percent think Sotomayor was wrong to permit New Haven to throw out the results of a promotional exam for firefighters, simply because no African-Americans scored well enough to qualify for promotion.
Asked if Sotomayor’s ruling, which has been appealed to the Supreme Court and may be overturned, would make them less likely to support Sotomayor’s confirmation, 28 percent said they would be less likely to support her. Fifty-nine percent said her ruling would make no difference in terms of their support.
The results indicate Sotomayor and President Obama could be seriously out of step with voters on the importance of hiring decisions blind to a person’s race or personal background, especially in the midst of a serious economic downturn when workers are competing for jobs.
By a 59 to 27 percent margin, even Democrats thought New Haven was wrong to disregard the results of the exam.
{snip}
Other findings of the survey:
# By 70 to 25 percent, voters oppose giving racial groups an advantage in getting government jobs in order to increase diversity. That is particularly significant, Brown says, because the justification for affirmative action programs has shifted from compensating for past racial discrimination toward promoting socially beneficial diversity.
{snip}
# Voters in every racial and religious demographic, by 74 to 21 percent, oppose using racial preferences to promote diversity in private sector jobs.
# Americans support affirmative action programs for the disabled, by a 55 to 39 percent margin.
# African-American voters support affirmative action, 49 to 45, while Hispanics oppose it by 58 to 38 percent.
# By a 59 to 30 percent margin, African-American voters support affirmative action for Hispanics. But Hispanics are split, by 47 to 48 percent.
“What is significant is that the public clearly opposes the idea that such programs are justified as a way of increasing diversity,” Brown says, “which has become the rationale in recent years as opposed to compensating for past discrimination which was the reason when they first began.”
{snip}
[Editor’s Note: Other stories dealing with the New Haven firefighters case are listed here.
Original article
(Posted on June 3, 2009)
Comments
It didn’t say, but whites must have had disapproved by a 4-to-1 margin. Now if only we can get some politicians to come out against it. AA has probably become as big of a cuss word as liberal. The only reason the Ward Connerly thing failed in Colorado (narrowly) is that too many white right wingers stayed home b/c of McCain’s immigration treachery.
Yet one more example of how the politicians are simply ignoring the citizens and doing exactly as they please for their own agenda. Sotomayor absolultey IS a RACIST. I love it when the liberals get their own accusations thrown back in their faces.
we no longer live in democracy. we vote for our leaders but they don’t represent us. people oppose affirmative action, people oppose illegal immigration, people oppose the drug war, people oppose the bailouts, people oppose increasing the national debt. and yet we we have politicians who support all those things. i bet the chinese and north korean regimes look at us and are amazed. we are a free country yet we are a meek people. we police our own thoughts. history will not look kindly upon us as a nation and a people and we will fully deserve whatever punishment we receive for our silence. i welcome any kind of optimism.
I have always been skeptical of polls. In additional to the bias of the pollsters and how the questions are framed, people may be less than 100% truthful when being asked sensitive questions.
I believe blacks and hispanics favor affirmative action by much larger percentages than this “scientific” poll indicates. Does anyone really believe only 49% of blacks support affirmative action?
Humans are pack animals and will vote their own group interests. White liberals are the exception but many will awaken in the next 10 years as the economy slides into the abyss.
Affirmative action is when a well-off liberal denies something to a working class White in order to give that something to a non-White, or sometimes a White woman. This “something” is never anything a liberal would want for themselves. The Liberals never offer to give up their own or their kids’ opportunities, it’s always the White working man. College admissions don’t really matter because the colleges simply expand, maybe add a racial studies department, to contain the diversity. They keep the same number of spaces for the real students. But when an inferior job applicant is hired in preference to a White, that job is filled for the next 20 or 30 years. Since liberals have such contempt for, and ignorance of, real work, they are content to have incompetents holding all such positions.
“Voters dead set against racial preferences.”
After a civil war,and a hundred and fifty years of so-called debate, you would think that this would be a given. Not so with the liberal/progressives. I have always wondered just when that state of bliss comes about called “equality”. Sandra Day O’Conner thought and indeed voted on it being another twenty-five years. She did qualify her ruling though, and said that it might take much longer.
And let’s be honest, for liberal/progressives, it might never be reached. They aren’t really known for having a sense of balance on anything.
Nothing will really change until the Griggs v. Duke Power Co (google it up!) is reversed by the Supreme Court.
This is where the fallacious legal doctrine of “disparate impact” has been invented.
It is the root judicial cause of all the reverse discrimination malady that America is suffering from these days, which includes rewarding illegal “immigrants” from Third World countries and other race-based preferences.
It is the largest nail into the America’s coffin that the Supreme Court has driven after the mid-1960ties disastrous legislation championed and signed by Johnson.
If only all good men focussed on erradication of this evil, we would be able to save America from becoming a Third-World country with Robert Mugabe-like “social justice” of the failed against the successful.
Trouble is Newsmax is a bogus source according to leftists. Anyone got polls on AA from sources the average American has heard of?
It can be considered nothing short of bizarre that any person can find discrimination by race both wrong and unjust only to become confused on the subject when the person being discriminated against due to race is white. It is obvious the real racists here are the liberals because it is becoming all too obvious that they are the ones doing everything in their power to prevent a racially blind society, where one is rewarded on individual merits and not on their inherited genetics, from being realized. How being in favor of racial discrimination ever became a liberal ideal I don’t know but it needs to be exposed and stopped. Judge Sotomayor could not be a better example of this unjust liberal ideology. President Obama has stabbed every white person that voted for him in the back with his nomination of her to the Supreme Court.
“Poll: Voters Disagree With Sotomayor on Affirmative Action.”
So disgusting. Another cry baby non-white wanting special privileges for all the rest like her, when the fact of the matter is that she’s been fortunate to have had her education paid for by AA, while the rest of us had to work for ours, and some of us, myself included, had to work in the evenings after serving in the military in order to take advantage of the GI Bill.
She claims the “richness” of her “hard” life as a minority, but how hard could it be since it only involved a few years before she became a professional student, paid for by our tax dollars.
Plain and simply, as Rush, Newt, and many others are saying she’s a racist who is anti-white and will render all her decisions to favor non-whites.
I absolutely detest this government because of its responsibility in creating this multicultural paradise, right along with the religious zealots who have helped flood the nation with third world criminals.
But, it’s coming apart now. There’s just to much unravelling for it to ever survive in its present form.
Funny. They don’t mention the percentage of White people who disagree with the esteemed miss sotomayor.
It does not matter what voters think about Sotomayor, Supreme Court Judges are not elected. This Federal Government no longer cares what voters think anymore because ACORN now counts the votes and adjusts the count to insure the election of Democrats.
Voters may not agree with affirmative action, but they vote for a president who is nothing more than affirmative action and most likely to implement more of it.
Schizophrenia. Nothing more.
My opinion of the average american has not gone up one bit.
What possibly could be the relevance of voter opposition to affirmative action?
Our sage betters have already decided that issue for us.
The talking point for this particular episode is to contain the word “fairness” in every soundbite. It relates to the case of Ricci that Sotamayor tried to hide, and it targets the disparate groups of the left. First it targets the feminine white lib who wants to be seen as “fair” to all, and it puts the minorities on the defensive and in a shrieking mode.
the dispossession of white america will continue to happen despite our ‘opinion’- we have an elite who HATE us.
No … this is fascinating.
The numbers for Whites and Hispanics are a bit on the lower end, as was to be expected.
Disregarding the probable skewing of the poll, this can only mean one of two things:
We will see.
“Affirmative action is when a well-off liberal denies something to a working class White in order to give that something to a non-White, or sometimes a White woman… when an inferior job applicant is hired in preference to a White, that job is filled for the next 20 or 30 years.”
Notice when the affirmative action hire is in management, or ‘works’ themselves up to management, this same person, who was hired in part do to affirmative action, returns the favor by making all future hires persons of color. So then the store has almost complete diversity. Not to mention the stores and shops in certain neighborhoods, and in certain cities now, that are already completely ‘diversified’ ie no whites, to begin with.
excuse my lack of capital letters or proper punctuation. my keyboard is on the blink.
i can share some experience with a.a. around 35 years ago. i was in pre-med in a small state university in louisiana. i belonged to the pre-med society there. we usually took a field trip or two per year to one of the medical or dental schools in the area. on one of the trips as a sophomore, i sat with some of the biology facutly, who would routinely take trips with us and serve as chaparones. being a youngster, i sat and with our faculty and listened as my professors talked of a black female who was a senior who had just been accepted to 3 medical school simultaneously. according to the faculty, her grades were just above passing at a 2.2 gpa and she was only on the field trip to sample out baylor medical school in houston…the school michael de bakey made famous as a world-class heart surgeon. in additon to lsu and tulane in new orleans, she had also been accepted to baylor.
