Voting for Disabled Candidates

In The Politics of Autism, I write:  "Support from the general public will be an important political asset for autistic people. Another will be their sheer numbers, since a larger population of identified autistic adults will mean more autistic voters and activists."  Previous posts have discussed autistic officeholders and political candidates in California,  New York, Georgia, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Voting for Disabled Candidates
Stefanie Reher  The Journal of Politics 2025 87:2, 790-794.

Despite important advances in the rights of disabled people, stigma and prejudice remain widespread. Meanwhile, disabled political representatives are few and far between. This raises the question: do voters discriminate against disabled candidates? This study uses conjoint experiments in the United States and the United Kingdom to show that candidates with physical or sensory impairments are preferred by voters on the left, whereas voters on the right are more likely to vote for nondisabled candidates. However, these effects are almost entirely due to voters’ perceptions of disabled candidates as more left-wing. When perceived ideology is held constant or candidates’ party affiliation is known, candidate disability does not affect the vote choice among right-wing voters. Left-wing voters still reward left-wing disabled candidates for representing under-represented groups. The findings expand our understanding of the role of disability in electoral politics and should encourage candidates and parties concerned about discrimination at the ballot box.

California Voters Back New Vax Law

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing disease to spread. 

From UC Berkeley:

Just 16% of voters are opposed to a new California law requiring parents vaccinate their children, according to a new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

The poll, conducted online from Sept. 13 to 18, found support for the bill from the vast majority of Californians: rich or poor, conservative or liberal, educated or not. Roughly 83% of all voters said they favored the law, 61% said they favored it strongly.

“Support is broad-based with large majorities across all major subgroups of the state’s registered voter population in favor,” said Mark DiCamillo, head of the Berkeley IGS Poll. “Liberals display the highest levels of support, with greater than nine in 10 in favor.”
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The poll surveyed 4,527 registered voters in both English and Spanish. The poll had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

From the complete analysis of the new Berkeley IGS Poll

Support for the new law spans all major demographic and regional subgroups of the state’s registered voter population. There are, however,some variations in the size of the majorities favoring the law relating to voters’self-described political ideology. Support is strongest among liberals, nine in ten of whom favorit. Support declines to 67% among voters who describe themselves as very conservative in politics, with one in three (32%) opposed

Liberals, Conservatives, Vaccines

In The Politics of Autism, I look at the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism.

Charles McCoy writes at The Conversation:

As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.

Yet, other research suggests that it is in fact conservatives who are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism, that it is liberals who are more likely to endorse pro-vaccination statements and that the more strongly someone identifies with the Republican Party, the more likely he or she is to have a negative opinion of vaccination.

The Pew Research Center has conducted two surveys that asked about vaccination. One survey in early 2015 asked respondents about whether they thought vaccines were safe, and another survey in late 2014 asked respondents about U.S. vaccination policy and whether vaccination for children should be required or a parent’s choice.

When relating the answers to these questions in the Pew surveys to people’s political views, I find an interesting divergence. The more conservative and also the more liberal someone is, the more likely he or she is to believe that vaccination is unsafe.

Yet only those who are very conservative are more likely to believe that vaccination should be a parent’s choice. This suggests the social dynamics that shape Americans’ personal beliefs about vaccine safety are not the same as the social dynamics that shape their views about whether parents can decide not to vaccinate their children.

Left, Right, and Autism

At The Age of Autism, Dan Olmstead notes that the issue does not fall neatly along a left-right spectrum:

One key part of the progressive agenda of the last century has been improving health – and especially children’s health – through mass vaccination against deadly diseases. And now come a new group of people, autism parents, who allegedly want to roll back all this progress so long in the making. And how do they want to accomplish this nefarious (and nebulous) goal? By questioning the consensus that genes cause autism, and by claiming that the environment – and plausibly some aspect of the very same mass vaccination campaign -- is implicated in autism’s epidemic rise. Cleverly labeling these concerns “anti-vaccine” and, implicitly, anti-progress, makes it easy to ignore a fundamental truth -- that every ideology including progressivism can go too far, get hijacked by forces that should be its natural enemies, and fail to understand what is required at a particular historical moment.

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The best major-media reporting recently on this issue has come from conservative Fox News, which has taken to running almost weekly reports. The network seems to have been prompted by the government’s strange concession in Vaccine Court – that autism was not “caused” by vaccines but autistic symptoms “resulted” from the vaccinations – which a reporter called “fishy legal language.”