Anti-vax attitudes and political ideology

So, I was reading this article, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has a New Plan to Paralyze the Vote Count in a Critical Swing State,” and I came to this bit:

After striving to get his name on the ballot in as many places as possible, Kennedy suspended his third-party run last month, endorsing Trump over Kamala Harris. The former candidate is now trying to take his name off the ballot in battleground states for fear that he might siphon off votes from Trump. Yet he is still fighting to keep his name on the ballot in other states, including New York. It is not entirely clear why Kennedy cares about staying on the ballot anywhere; his overall strategy, however, reflects an intent to destabilize the election and abridge the early voting period, as he did in North Carolina.

Kennedy was booted off the ballot in New York in August after a judge found that he had falsely claimed residence in the state on his nominating petition. (Smoking-gun evidence proved that he lied about living as a tenant at the listed address.) Every lower court affirmed that decision, agreeing that the false residence invalidated his candidacy. Yet Kennedy is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to restore his name to the ballot in an emergency order. New York has already begun printing and mailing ballots, so this eleventh-hour change would massively disrupt early voting—but again, as in North Carolina, that seems to be the point. Kennedy’s lead counsel, Jed Rubenfeld, claimed that his client’s exclusion from the ballot condemns New Yorkers to be “irrevocably deprived” of their First Amendment right to support his campaign.

That name “Jed Rubenfeld” was vaguely familiar so I googled. He’s the Yale law school professor who one of his coworkers has described as “the most gifted constitutional theorist (not to mention the most elegant legal writer) of his generation” (yeah, the standards are low in legal academia) and I guess is more famous now for sexual misconduct allegations and being married to the mentor of J. D. Vance. All of that rang a bell, but I hadn’t realized before reading his wikipedia page that he’d represented an anti-vax organization in federal court and that he cowrote an article with Trump’s former Attorney General.

There are lots of legal academics on the other side, who are working in some way or another for the Democrats, so fair enough that Rubenfeld is offering his specious arguments on behalf of the Republican campaign. Sill, the anti-vax thing: that, along with election denial, that seems like it’s a bit over the top. I’d guess that Rubenfeld, like his Harvard colleague Adrian Vermeule, sees himself as more of a charming imp challenging preconceived notions, rather than a chaos agent who’d like to destroy the separation of powers.

To put it another way: My guess is that Rubenfeld thinks it will be the 1980s forever, and he’d like to continue hobnobbing with the rich and powerful and, just for fun, giving a poke in the eye to the sanctimonious liberals who he has to encounter every damn day at Yale.

This is now, that was then

Nowadays, anti-vax attitudes are highly tied to the political far right—Kennedy and Trump are part of the story, but it’s not just that. Indeed, back in 2020 when the government was working on the vaccine, Trump was criticized from the right on that.

Sometimes you hear people say that anti-vax sentiment used to be coming from the left and now comes from the right. This is related to another occasionally-stated but pretty much false claim that opposition to genetically modified foods was coming from the left.

Regarding vaccines, I happened to be cleaning out my inbox and noticed an email from 2015 from political scientist Eric Oliver:

I saw your recent Monkey Cage post about ideology, vaccines, autism [Is it really true that conservatives are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism? Yes.] and thought you might be interested in the following.

Tom Wood and I have some recent survey data (SSI survey in January with 1281 respondents) on this and the relationship depends a lot on question wording, response distribution, and magical thinking.

We asked respondents if they believed vaccines caused autism and gave them the option of don’t believe (54 percent), not sure (37 percent), or believe (9 percent).

If you just compare believers to rest you get a breakdown by ideology that looks like this:

Believe Vaccines cause Autism

Very liberal 6 liberal 8 Moderate 8 Conservative 9 Very Conserv. 18

However, if you break this down by a magical belief scale (believe in ESP, past lives, alternative medicine, power of positive thinking, manichean world view) you get distributions that look like this:

Magical Thinking Low High Very liberal 2 15 liberal 3 15 Moderate 5 12 Conservative 6 14 Very Conserv. 7 29

Still some small effects of ideology, but they pale in comparison to effects of magical thinking. If you run all of this in a regression equation with the standard demographic controls, the effects of ideology basically disappear once you take magical thinking into account.

In short, strong conservatives are more likely to think vaccines cause autism because a larger percentage of conservatives have magical beliefs (due partly to the fact that so many religious fundamentalists identify as strong conservatives).

This is all part of a book we’re working on called Enchanted America. It’s about how magical thinking organizes public opinion.

It looks like the book came out in 2018. I should read it!