Can 46% of Mississippi Republicans favor banning interracial marriage?

That’s the number. At least according to Public Policy Polling. That seems rather high. So I decided to go back and look at the RACMAR variable in the General Social Survey. Here’s the question:

Do you think there should be laws against marriages between African-Americans and whites?

They kept asking the question for 30 years, but dropped it in 2002. Here’s the reason:

By 2002 it was a consistent finding that less than 10% of Americans would accede to the proposition that interracial marriage should be legally banned. So the finding that that 46% of Mississippi Republicans agree with that position, and that only 40% reject it outright, is somewhat curious. Here’s the question in PPP:

Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?

The outcomes were:

– 40% said legal

– 46% said illegal

– 14% were not sure

Remember that the sample was limited to Mississippi Republicans. Let’s go back and look at some of the demographic correlates for the responses to RACMAR between 1998 and 2002, when the proportion responding yes and no was relatively constant. I’ll focus on region and politics.

The “East South Central” is a Census division. It consists of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Of these states Mississippi is probably the most conservative one, so we can assume that its proportion was higher than 34 percent. Also, it is the least populous of the states, with less than half the population of Tennessee, so its weight may have been lower. It still seems to me that 10 years on from 2002 we should see a lower number than 46 percent for Mississippi Republicans, but the PPP value isn’t implausible on the face of it. Additionally, the election of a biracial liberal Democrat as President of the United States may have made the race issue more salient for white Southern Republicans.

Finally, there were two crosstabs which I thought were kind of strange:

I think the liberal Republican opposition to interracial marriage in Mississippi is due to small sample size and mistaken responses. I really doubt there are very many liberal Republicans in Mississippi. But the age results confuse me. The GSS doesn’t indicate any increased opposition to interracial marriage among conservative/Republican respondents 10 years ago in the East South Central region. On the contrary.