Sandara Park: On Politics: Support for the death penalty? Depends on how you ask.

June 2, 2021

By Giovanni Russonello

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia walking past holding cells next to the death chamber at the Greensville Correctional Center before he signed a bill abolishing the state's death penalty in March.Steve Helber/Associated Press

The use of capital punishment has fallen to historically low levels in recent years. This year, Virginia became the first Southern state to outlaw the practice.

Support for the death penalty has been in decline since the 1990s, when close to four in five Americans were for it. On the campaign trail last year, Joe Biden committed to ending capital punishment nationwide (though he hasn't taken any major steps to follow through on that since taking office).

Still, a solid majority of Americans continue to favor keeping the death penalty, driven by the conviction that it's morally justified in cases of murder — even though most of the country recognizes that there are racial disparities in how it's doled out, and an overwhelming majority admits that it sometimes results in the death of an innocent person.

We can say all this with relative certainty thanks to a Pew Research Center poll released today. Sixty percent considered the death penalty acceptable for people convicted of murder, according to the survey of Pew's online American Trends Panel.

But arguably the most intriguing part of the report wasn't the numbers themselves. It was how those numbers might have looked, if the pollsters had used an older method: phone calls.

Until this year, Pew contacted at least some of its respondents via phone, allowing researchers to compare results between so-called modes. They found that on certain policy-related questions — particularly morally or ethically sensitive ones — there could be significant differences between people's responses to self-administered online surveys and to live telephone interviewers.

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Polls on the death penalty presented one of the most glaring examples. More than other issues — and far more than on questions about candidate choice, which generally aren't as deeply impacted by survey mode — capital punishment drew meaningfully different responses.

Last year, participants of Pew's online panel were 13 points more likely than those surveyed by phone to say they approved of the death penalty. Among Democrats, there was a particularly strong aversion to expressing support via phone: In an August 2020 Pew poll, just 32 percent of Democratic respondents via phone said they supported the death penalty, while 49 percent of online Democratic respondents did.

If Pew had only reported its phone poll results last summer, it would have shown that support for capital punishment was down to 52 percent, more than 20 percentage points off its high in the 1990s. Instead, its online poll revealed that closer to two-thirds were in favor of it.

There are a number of issues that make phone polls different from online surveys, including the fact that they tend to yield a slightly different sample of respondents. But Pew's researchers have taken this into account, and they're "absolutely" convinced that so-called social desirability bias is the strongest factor driving mode differences here, said Courtney Kennedy, Pew's director of survey research.

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"It's a bit of a touchy subject, it's kind of sensitive, and admitting that you hold an opinion that has such profound implications for somebody else — not everybody wants to engage with that with a stranger," Kennedy said, referring to questions about the death penalty.

Carroll Doherty, the director of political research at Pew, said that capital punishment was up there with immigration on the list of issues where response is most affected by survey mode.

The stark differences among Democratic respondents indicate "that this is an issue on which they're kind of cross-pressured," Doherty said. "You see many Democrats saying the death penalty is morally justified in cases of murder, and on the other hand, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to have doubts about its implementation, especially whether there's racial bias."

One thing that's consistent in Pew's research: Republicans tend to be far more supportive of capital punishment than Democrats. Likewise, white Americans are considerably more supportive than Black Americans, and less concerned about racial disparities.

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Among Republicans and independents who lean toward the G.O.P., 77 percent said in the new poll that they supported the death penalty. And 80 percent called its use morally justified "when someone commits a crime like murder." Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, just 46 percent favored the practice; 51 percent called it morally justified.

Even among Republicans, however, there was broad acknowledgment that it's impossible to ensure innocent people won't be executed. Just 31 percent of Republicans and leaners said there were "adequate safeguards" to that effect. Only 12 percent of Democrats and their leaners said so.

And most Americans — 63 percent — doubted that the death penalty successfully discouraged crime. Even among those who favored its use, just 50 percent said it was a deterrent to serious crimes.

At 63 percent, white Americans were far more likely to support the death penalty than Black Americans, who were evenly split. The inverse was true on the question of whether the death penalty is applied unfairly across race, something that studies consistently find to be true.

Fully 85 percent of Black people said that whites were less likely to be put to death for similar crimes, but white respondents were evenly divided on the question.

From Opinion: The G.O.P.'s youth conundrum

By Charlotte Alter

Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of "The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America."

Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation's core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.

"Whether it's environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow," Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. "We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it."

It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.

So Curbelo and Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing's fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Costello and Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)

But their visions of the "America of tomorrow" hadn't foreseen Donald Trump.

By 2018, Trump's antics had helped lead Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall, Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.

Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Trump's campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: Last month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.

When I interviewed Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. "The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters," she told me. "Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done." Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Stefanik's rise — and her colleagues' fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It's a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating its hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Read the full piece from Opinion.