the journal of public and international affairsanthony j. mcgann, charles anthony smith, michael...

Book Reviews in this Issue $13.00David Shambaugh, China’s FutureROBERT SUTTER p. 751

Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive DiplomacyMARK S. BELL p. 752

David A. Lake, The Statebuilder’s Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention JAMES J. WIRTZ p. 754

Anthony Gregory, American Surveillance: Intelligence, Privacy, and the Fourth AmendmentBRUCE E. ALTSCHULERp. 755

Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, Dictators and Democrats: Masses, Elites, and Regime ChangeJACK SNYDERp. 757

Robert S. Ross and Jo Inge Bekkevold, China in the Era of Xi Jinping: Domestic and Foreign Policy Challenges ANDREW SCOBELLp. 759

Syaru Shirley Lin, Taiwan’s China Dilemma: Contested Identities and Multiple Interests in Taiwan’s Cross-Strait Economic PolicyYONG DENGp. 760

Kenneth Scheve and David Stasavage, Taxing the Rich: A History of Fiscal Fairness in the United States and EuropeCHRISTOPHER FARICYp. 762

Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International RelationsBRIAN SCHMIDTp. 763

Sam Lebovic, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America JARED SCHROEDERp. 765

Anthony J. McGann, Charles Anthony Smith, Michael Latner, Alex Keena, Gerrymandering in America: The House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Popular SovereigntyBARRY C. EDWARDSp. 766

George Hawley, Right-Wing Critics of American ConservatismPAUL ELLIOTT JOHNSON p. 768

Jeffrey S. Selinger, Embracing Dissent: Political Violence and Party Development in the United States JEFFREY D. BROXMEYERp. 769

Greg Goelzhauser, Choosing State Supreme Court Justices: Merit Selection and the Consequences of Institutional ReformJENNA BECKER KANEp. 771

Louis J. Virelli III, Disqualifying the High Court: Supreme Court Recusal and the Constitution JONATHAN PARENTp. 772

Jefferson Decker, The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government PHILIP KRONEBUSCH p. 774

Matthew Dallek, Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland SecurityJEREMY L. STRICKLER p. 775

Kristin M. Szylvian, The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle ClassPHILIP ROCCOp. 777

Michael Brem Bonner, Confederate Political Economy: Creating and Managing a Southern Corporatist Nation, 1861-1865PATRICK G. WILLIAMSp. 778

Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State ViolenceZOLTAN BARANYp. 780

Miriam J. Anderson, Windows of Opportunity: How Women Seize Peace Negotiations for Political ChangeSANDI E. COOPERp. 781

Maria C. Escobar-Lemmon and Michelle M. Taylor-Robinson, Women in Presidential Cabinets: Power Players or Abundant Tokens?INGRID BEGOp. 783

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the EnlightenmentMAHMOOD MONSHIPOURIp. 784

William J. Brenner, Confounding Powers: Anarchy and International Society from the Assassins to Al QaedaCHRISTOPHER J. FETTWEISp. 786

Bruce Miroff, Presidents on Political Ground: Leaders in Action and What They FaceMARK A. SCULLYp. 787

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The Journal of Public and International Affairs

The Case of the Pivot to Asia: System Effects and the Origins of StrategyNICHOLAS D. ANDERSON and VICTOR D. CHA

Disruption, Demonization, Deliverance, and Norm Destruction: The Rhetorical Signature of Donald J. TrumpKATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON and DORON TAUSSIG

The U.S. Nuclear Umbrella over South Korea: Nuclear Weapons and Extended DeterrenceTERENCE ROEHRIG

Why the Great Powers Permitted the Creation of an American HegemonCHAD E. NELSON

Down with the Southern Cross: Opinions on the Confederate Battle Flag in South CarolinaSCOTT H. HUFFMON, H. GIBBS KNOTTS, and SETH C. MCKEE

The Enduring Appeal and Danger of World Order Making by the U.S.: A Review EssayRONALD R. KREBS

Book Reviews

Title Page and Index to Volume 132

Down with the Southern Cross:Opinions on the Confederate BattleFlag in South Carolina

SCOTT H. HUFFMONH. GIBBS KNOTTSSETH C. MCKEE

A HORRIFIC MASS SHOOTING IN A BLACK CHURCH in Charleston,South Carolina, became themobilizing force for taking down the Confederatebattle flag from the State House grounds in Columbia. In this article, wechronicle disputes over the Confederate flag in the American South and thenturn our attention to the case of South Carolina. Using survey data from theWinthropPoll (WP),we evaluate theopinionsof SouthCarolinians toward theConfederate flagbefore andafter theCharleston shooting.Before this senselessmassacre, our findings show, there was a palpable racial divide in opinionstoward theRebel flag and sharp divisions amongwhites on the basis of certaindemographics and sociopolitical attitudes. After the shooting, our analysis

SCOTT H. HUFFMON is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Social andBehavioral Research Lab at Winthrop University. His research interests include publicopinion, southern politics, and religion and politics. H. GIBBS KNOTTS is Professor ofPolitical Science and Department Chair at the College of Charleston. His primary researchfocuses on state politics, political behavior, public administration, and southern politics. Hismost recent book (coauthored with Christopher A. Cooper) is The Resilience of SouthernIdentity: Why the South Still Matters in the Minds of Its People. SETH C. MCKEE isAssociate Professor of Political Science at Texas Tech University. His primary area ofresearch focuses on American electoral politics and especially party system change in theAmerican South. McKee is the author of Republican Ascendancy in Southern U.S. HouseElections, editor of Jigsaw Puzzle Politics in the Sunshine State, and author of theforthcoming textbook The Dynamics of Southern Politics: Causes and Consequences.

POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY | Volume 132 Number 4 2017-18 | www.psqonline.org# 2017 Academy of Political Science DOI: 10.1002/polq.12700 719

indicates, the Charleston tragedy galvanized opinion, black andwhite, in favorof taking down the Confederate flag.

On the evening of 17 June 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof of Eastover,South Carolina, went to the “Holy City” of Charleston to commit anunspeakable tragedy. Around 9:00 p.m., Roof murdered nine black pa-rishioners at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,about an hour after he was welcomed to participate in a Bible study.1 Thishorrific hate crime was quickly connected to a divisive political issue inSouth Carolina and other southern states: the Confederate battle flag.2

As is true in other Deep South states, particularly Alabama, Georgia,and Mississippi, South Carolina has endured a tumultuous history forflying a Confederate flag on its State House grounds, originally atop theCapitol dome in 1962 in July 2000, the Rebel flag was relocated to fly at aConfederate memorial.3 The Charleston shooting proved a galvanizingpolitical event that swiftly mobilized the forces of opposition to the raciallypolarizing symbol of the Confederate flag.4 Led by Republican governorNikki Haley, both chambers of the South Carolina Legislature voted infavor of removing the Confederate flag from the State House grounds(with unanimous Democratic support), and less than a month after theCharlestonmassacre, on 9 July 2015, the consignment of theRebel flag to amuseum became official.5

In this article, we make use of surveys administered by the WinthropPoll for the purpose of gauging South Carolina opinion on the removal of

1Robert Costa, Lindsey Bever, J. FreedomduLac, and SariHorwitz, “Church Shooting Suspect DylannRoofCaptured Amid Hate Crime Investigation,” Washington Post, 18 June 2015.2Shortly after Roof was identified as the culprit, pictures surfaced of him posing with various popular whitesupremacist symbols, including the Confederate battle flag.3In keeping with convention, we define the Deep South as consisting of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,Mississippi, and South Carolina: the southern states with the highest proportion of black residents and, notcoincidentally, the highest degree of racially polarized political behavior. See Earl Black and Merle Black,Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge,MA:HarvardUniversity Press, 1987); V.O. Key, Jr., SouthernPolitics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); and Seth C. McKee and Melanie J.Springer, “A Tale of ‘Two Souths’: White Voting Behavior in Contemporary Southern Elections,” SocialScience Quarterly 96 (June 2015): 588–607. The Rim South states that seceded from the Union includeArkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.4The irreconcilable views on themeaning and purpose for displaying theRebel flag cannot escape the realitythat “Civil Rights leaders came to view the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of racism because theyencountered it in situations in which white people intended it as a symbol of racism.” John M. Coski, TheConfederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press, 2005), quoted in Vincent L. Hutchings, Hanes Walton, Jr., and Andrea Benjamin, “TheImpact of Explicit Racial Cues on Gender Differences in Support for Confederate Symbols and Partisan-ship,” Journal of Politics 72 (October 2010): 1175–1188, at 1185.5Ralph Ellis, Ben Brumfield, andMeridith Edwards, “S.C. Governor Signs Bill to Remove Confederate Flagfrom Capitol Grounds,” CNN, 10 July 2015, accessed at http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/09/us/south-carolina-confederate-battle-flag/index.html, 7 October 2017.

720 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

the Confederate flag from the StateHouse grounds in Columbia before andafter the shooting. Specifically, we ask, what individual-level factorsexplained support for the South Carolina Confederate flag prior to theCharleston tragedy?Howdid these individual-level factors change, if at all,following the shooting? This account is perhaps the final chapter in thelong-running saga over the Confederate flag in the Palmetto State. As such,we proceed by discussing previous research on the Confederate flag con-troversy in the South more generally and then more specifically in the caseof South Carolina. Then we narrow our focus to works that have assessedpublic opinion toward state-sanctioned flying of the Rebel flag. Next, wediscuss our data andmethods and then present the results of our analysis ofopinions regarding the Confederate flag and its removal in South Carolina.Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of the significance of this eventwithin the context of southern politics.

THE CONFEDERATE FLAG CONTROVERSY IN THE SOUTH AND

SOUTH CAROLINAFor the handful of generations who came on the political scene after theCivilWar, both northern and southern politicianswere complicit inwavingthe “bloody shirt,” reminding voters above the Mason-Dixon Line that theGrand Old Party (GOP) had preserved the Union and that down inDemocratic Dixie, the Confederate battle flag symbolized the valiant butlost cause of extricating the South from northern tyranny. At least in thelate 1800s, the Confederate flag was primarily associated with the “WarBetween the States,”6 and it was only tangentially tied to the inescapablefact that the preservation of slavery was the impetus for secession.7 Indeed,the only state-sanctioned embrace of the Confederate flag occurred inMississippi, which began flying its version of the Southern Cross in 1894.8

The renaissance of the Confederate flag took place during the civil rightsera, especially after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in1954. The rebirth of the southern version of the St. Andrew’s Crosscoincided with the rise of white “massive resistance”9 to black-led effortsto end the South’s oppressive system of Jim Crow segregation.10 For

6J. Michael Martinez, “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 92 (Summer2008): 200–228.7Key, Southern Politics, chap. 1.8Gokhan R. Karahan and William F. Shughart II, “Under Two Flags: Symbolic Voting in the State ofMississippi,” Public Choice 118 (January 2004): 105–124.9Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999).10C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

OPINIONS ON THE CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAG | 721

instance, during South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond’s insurgentStates’RightsDemocratic Party presidential campaign in 1948,11 the RebelCross was prominently displayed by his Dixiecrat supporters.12 Indeed, the“strongest icon of ‘the massive resistance’ was the Confederate battleflag.”13

In 1956, Georgia altered its flag to include a version of the St. Andrew’sCross,14 and in 1962,15 ostensibly as a centennial commemoration of itsinvolvement in the Civil War, South Carolina began flying a Confederatebattle flag above the dome of its state capitol.16 Both of these state’s actionswere met with controversy,17 which only grew stronger as time passed andmore recent generations of residents with less tolerance for a divisivesymbol spoke out. Partisan change in southern politics became an inter-esting component of the feud over the Confederate flag. When Alabama,

11Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2001).12Jessica Taylor, “The Complicated History of the Confederate Flag,”National Public Radio, 22 June 2015,accessed at http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/22/416548613/the-complicated-political-history-of-the-confederate-flag, 7 October 2017.13Quoting Francis M. Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: George Braziller, 1973), inRobert C. George andGerald R.Webster, “‘Heart of Dixie’ on the Alabama License Tag:Where Did It ComeFrom andDoes It Represent the Past, the Future, or Both?,” International Social Science Review 72 (1997):33–49, at 42.14Charles S. Bullock III and M. V. Hood III, “When Southern Symbolism Meets the Pork Barrel:Opportunity for Executive Leadership,” Social Science Quarterly 86 (March 2005): 69–86; John A. Clark,“ExplainingElite Attitudes on theGeorgia Flag,”AmericanPolitics Quarterly25 (October 1997): 482–496;and Beth Reingold and Richard S. Wike, “Confederate Symbols, Southern Identity, and Racial Attitudes:The Case of the Georgia State Flag,” Social Science Quarterly 79 (September 1998): 568–580.15We are not absolutely certain when the Confederate battle flag first appeared above South Carolina’sCapitol dome. According to Gerald R.Webster and Jonathan I. Leib, “Whose South Is It Anyway? Race andthe Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina,” Political Geography 20 (March 2001): 271–299, at 276:“The exact date for the first placement of the Confederate battle flag above the South Carolina Statehouse isunclear . . . The last living member of the state’s Confederate War Centennial Commission, Daniel Hollis,claims that it was first raised over the Statehouse on April 11, 1961, at the request of a state legislator fromAiken. Others suggest that it was not until March 20, 1962, when the South Carolina legislature voted infavor of a resolution to fly the flag above the capitol’s dome.”16Christopher A. Cooper and H. Gibbs Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support for the South CarolinaConfederate Flag,” Social Science Quarterly 87 (March 2006): 142–154; and Laura R. Woliver, AngelaD. Ledford, and Chris J. Dolan, “The South Carolina Confederate Flag: The Politics of Race and Citizen-ship,” Politics & Policy 29 (December 2001): 708–730. In 1963, as an outward act of defiance against thecivil rights protests embroiling his state, Democratic governor George Wallace ordered the Confederatebattle flag to fly above the dome of the Alabama Capitol building. In 2015, the tempest in South Carolinaallowed Alabama governor Robert Bentley to fly under the radar in removing Confederate flags from amemorial on its Capitol grounds on June 24 (see Brian Lyman, “Bentley Orders Removal of ConfederateFlags,” Montgomery (AL) Advertiser, 24 June 2015).17John Walker Davis, “An Air of Defiance: Georgia’s State Flag Change of 1956,” Georgia HistoricalQuarterly 82 (Summer 1998): 305–330; J. Michael Martinez, “State Displays of Confederate Symbols:Legal Challenges and the Political Question Doctrine,” Southeastern Political Review 25 (March 1997):163–180; Martinez, “The Georgia Confederate Flag Dispute”; Webster and Leib, “Whose South Is ItAnyway?”; and Woliver, Ledford, and Dolan, “The South Carolina Confederate Flag.”


Georgia, and South Carolina literally elevated the Rebel flag in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, the Democratic Party was dominant in statepolitics. In the absence of viable two-party competition, the growingnumber of black Democrats and their co-racial officeholders lacked theclout to force these state legislatures to take down the Confederate flag.

By the 1990s, however, the Republican Party was ascendant in southernelectoral politics, and black influence had increased within the ranks of theDemocratic opposition.18 In a role reversal, it was now Democrats whobecame increasingly restless with state sanctioning of the Confederate flag.Perhaps more than any other single opposition group, the National Associ-ation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) invested heavily inefforts to pressure Deep South states to discard official displays of theConfederate battle emblem. In 1993, a court order in the 1992 ruling inHolmes v. Hunt forced Republican Alabama governor GuyHunt to removetheConfederate flag from theCapitol building.19 InMississippi, theNAACPbrought a lawsuit in 1993 to take down its version of the Confederate flagbecause it was a “racist symbol,” but the state supreme court “rejected thatargument, holding that the flag ‘does not deprive any citizen of any consti-tutionally protected right.’”20 Nonetheless, in an interesting twist, the courtfound that “Mississippi had not possessed an official state flag since 1906”and “[a] governor-appointed bipartisan commission decided that a stateflag referendum would occur on April 17, 2001.”21 Upholding Mississippi’stradition as themost racially divisive state,22 perhaps it was no surprise that64 percent of Mississippians,23 almost all of whom were white,24 voted toretain their 107- year-old Confederate state flag, which still flies today.

18Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, 2002); DannyHayes and Seth C.McKee, “Toward AOne-Party South?,”American Politics Research36 (January 2008): 3–32; and M. V. Hood III, Quentin Kidd, and Irwin L. Morris, The RationalSoutherner: Black Mobilization, Republican Growth, and the Partisan Transformation of the AmericanSouth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).19George and Webster, “‘Heart of Dixie.’”20Byron D’Andra Orey, L. Marvin Overby, Barbara J. Walkosz, and Kimberly R. Walker, “Accounting for‘Racism’: Responses to Political Predicaments in Two States,” State Politics and Politics Quarterly 7(September 2007): 235–255, at 241.21Byron D’Andra Orey, “White Racial Attitudes and Support for the Mississippi State Flag,” AmericanPolitics Research 32 (January 2004): 102–116, at 103.22Frank R. Parker, Black Votes Count: Political Empowerment in Mississippi after 1965 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (Oxford,MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).23Karahan and Shughart, “Under Two Flags.”24Philip A. Klinkner, “Waving the ‘White’ Flag: Racial Voting Patterns in the 2001 Mississippi FlagReferendum,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34 (July 2001): 647; and Jonathan I. Leib and GeraldR. Webster, “Black, White or Green? The Confederate Battle Emblem and the 2001 Mississippi State FlagReferendum,” Southeastern Geographer 52 (Fall 2012): 299–326.


In Georgia and South Carolina, the most recent and contentious battle-grounds over flying the Rebel Cross, governors engaged the issue at theirelectoral peril. In these states, it had become clear to Democratic andRepublican governors alike that the Confederate flag was bad for busi-ness.25 In 1992 and 1993, conservative Democratic governor Zell Millermade a push to have theGeorgia flag changed ahead of his state’s hosting ofthe 1994 Super Bowl and the 1996 Olympics.26 The effort failed miserably,and it is thought that taking on the flag issue “reduced . . . [Miller’s 1994]reelection margin to 51 percent.”27 Roy Barnes, Miller’s Democratic suc-cessor, won the 1998 gubernatorial election. Near the end of his term, inthe absence of much fanfare, he executed some backroom deals28 to havethe legislature approve a new state flag that reduced the former version toone among several flags arrayed below the Georgia state seal.29 Amongother things (such as incurring the wrath of teachers with the passage ofeducation reforms), Barnes’s leadership in altering the state flag appar-ently contributed to his defeat in 2002 at the hands of Sonny Perdue,30 thefirst Republican governor of Georgia since 1872.

On the campaign trail, Perdue promised to revisit the flag issue, andafter considerable legislative maneuvering, the Georgia General Assemblyplaced a referendum before the voters for approving a new flag thatremoved the St. Andrew’s Cross.31 Given the choice between the current2001 flag approved by Governor Barnes and the alternative 2003 flagoffered by Governor Perdue, in early March 2004, “voters approved the2003 flag by a 3-to-1 margin.”32 The Confederate flag controversy wasfinally laid to rest in Georgia, despite a core of “flaggers” who felt thatGovernor Perdue had betrayed them by offering a new flag that removedthe Confederate battle emblem. Indeed, a county-level analysis revealsstrong evidence that an unusual coalition of Georgians most likely securedapproval of the 2003 flag: “many supporters of Republican gubernatorial

25In a recent study examining state legislator voting on removal of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, itwas found that wealthier lawmakers and those who own businesses were significantly more supportive ofhaving the flag taken down. See Jordan Carr Peterson and Christian R. Grose, “Personal Business Interestsand Legislative Voting to Remove Racially Intolerant Symbols” (paper presented at the Citadel Symposiumon Southern Politics, Charleston, SC, March 2016).26Clark, “Explaining Elite Attitudes.”27Bullock and Hood, “When Southern Symbolism Meets the Pork Barrel,” 71.28Ibid.29Michael Reksulak, Gokhan R. Karahan, and William F. Shughart II, “Flags of Our Fathers: Voting onConfederate Symbols in the State of Georgia,” Public Choice 131 (October 2007): 83–99.30Danny Hayes and Seth C. McKee, “Booting Barnes: Explaining the Historic Upset in the 2002 GeorgiaGubernatorial Election,” Politics & Policy 32 (December 2004): 708–739.31Specifically, voters could approve of one of two flags, the 2001 Barnes flag or the new 2003 Perdue flag.32Hutchings, Walton, and Benjamin, “The Impact of Explicit Racial Cues,” 1178.


candidate Sonny Perdue joined black and white liberal voters in rejectingthe 2001 flag.”33

In South Carolina, the Confederate flag has considerable meaning. TheCivil War began in Charleston, where Confederate troops fired on FortSumter on 12 April 1861. More recently, the salience of the flag took onheightened interest because of the state’s “First in the South” status inRepublican presidential primary contests.34 Presumably motivated by thedesire to shed the Palmetto State’s “Old South” image and cognizant of theneed to attract business to the state, in a somewhat surprising move, inNovember 1996, Republican governor David Beasley pushed for the re-moval of the Confederate flag from the State House.35 Unfortunately forthe governor, Republican legislators were decidedly against such a moveand bottled up any proposals intended to take down the flag. As the 1998gubernatorial election neared, Governor Beasley vowed to never againmeddle with the flag issue, but he still lost reelection to his Democraticchallenger, Jim Hodges. Under Hodges’s tenure, the flag issue becameevenmore heated. It came to the fore when theNAACP called for a tourismboycott in July 1999, which would take effect at the start of 2000 and lastuntil the Confederate flag was removed from the State House grounds.36

The 2000 Republican presidential primary brought even more atten-tion to the flag controversy as GOP contenders were pressed to weigh in.The combination of interest group pressure and national media attentionmobilized enough support to broker a legislative compromise thatrelocated the Rebel flag from the Capitol dome to a Confederate memoriallocated within the confines of the State House grounds, where it remainedfrom 1 July 2000 until 9 July 2015. The flag controversy in 2000demanded the attention of yet another governor, and its salience led theAssociated Press to award it the “top South Carolina story of the year.”37 Inthe 2002 election, Governor Hodges lost reelection to his Republicanchallenger, Congressman Mark Sanford.

33Reksulak, Karahan, and Shughart, “Flags of Our Fathers,” 99.34Danny Hayes and Seth C. McKee, “The Transformation of Southern Presidential Primaries,” in BranwellDuBose Kapeluck, Robert P. Steed, and Laurence W. Moreland, eds., Presidential Elections in the South:Putting 2008 in Political Context (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner), 39–69; and Donald Matthew Moore,“The Economic Impact of South Carolina’s 2012 Republican Presidential Primary” (master’s thesis,University of South Carolina, 2014).35Woliver, Ledford, and Dolan, “The South Carolina Confederate Flag.”36Aaron Gould Sheinin, “David Wilkins,” International Journal 60 (Autumn 2005): 1125–1132; WebsterandLeib, “Whose South Is It Anyway?”; andWoliver, Ledford, andDolan, “The SouthCarolina ConfederateFlag.”37KimBaca, “Confederate Flag Year’s Top Story,”Associated Press, 25December 2000, quoted in JamesM.Glaser, “Public Support for Political Compromise on a Volatile Racial Issue: Insight from the SurveyExperiment,” Political Psychology 27 (June 2006): 423–439, at 429.


The NAACP never accepted the flag compromise—the tourism boycottwas to remain in effect until the Confederate flag no longer flew anywhereon the StateHouse grounds. Since the summer of 2000, the presence of theRebel flag flying at the Confederate memorial continued to simmer andfester opposition. Although it may have been true of the compromise that“[m]ost politicians . . . have declared victory and moved on,” it is doubtfulthat “South Carolina seems to have accepted the outcome on the flag.”38

Instead, for 16 years, the flag controversy was in a semi-dormant state, withpolitical avoidance overtaking the necessary political leadership to revisitand reengage such a divisive issue.

As was true in 2000, when the compromise position was reached,likewise in the summer of 2015, a catalyzing event expanded the scopeof conflict and favored the mobilization of groups opposed to the statusquo.39 In 2015, it took a heinous act of racially motivated violence toremove the official display of the Rebel flag from the South Carolina StateHouse grounds. Soon after the Charleston massacre, editorial boardsacross the country, including both the Washington Post and theNew York Times, began to call on South Carolina’s elected officials toremove the flag. For example, remarking on the flag, the Post’s editorialboard said that “the message it sends is clear—and directly in contrast tothe lessons on tolerance and forgiveness that the people of Charleston havebeen teaching the nation since last week’s atrocity.”40 Closer to home, theGreenville News argued that the flag debate was about “whether our statecan recognize the scars that still linger from one people having enslavedanother, from one people having terrorized another, from one peoplehaving denied themost fundamental rights of life and liberty to another.”41

The editorial board of Charleston’s Post and Courier expressed a similarsentiment, saying that for some South Carolinians, “the flag has nothingbut dire associations that reflect the race hatred and lawlessness of those,such as the Ku Klux Klan, who appropriated it for their own purposes.”42

38Glaser, “Public Support for Political Compromise,” 438.39E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1960); andWoliver, Ledford, and Dolan, “The South Carolina Confederate Flag.”40“The Confederate Battle Flag Is Not Worthy of Respect,” Washington Post, 22 June 2015, accessed at

https://www.washingtonpostopinions/opinions/take-down-the-confederate-battle-flag-near-south-carolinas-capitol/2015/06/22/dfafa05e-1912-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html?utm_term=.e01fd065df95, 18 March 2016.41“Remove the Confederate Flag this Week,” Greenville (SC) News, 4 July 2015, accessed at http://www.greenvilleonlineopinions/story/opinion/editorials/2015/07/04/editorial-remove-confederate-flag-week/29641931/, 18 March 2016.42“Time to Furl the Confederate Flag,” Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), 22 June 2015, accessed at http://

www.postandcourieropinions/article/20150622/PC1002/150629774, 18 March 2016.


In the next section, we discuss previous research on public opiniontoward the Confederate flag and how it ties into our current examination ofthis subject with respect to the views of South Carolinians.

OPINIONS ON THE CONFEDERATE FLAGA considerable literature has examined opinions on the Confederate flag.Although by no means exhaustive, Table 1 displays a sampling of studiesthat have empirically assessed attitudes toward the Confederate flag since1997. Listing the studies from earliest to most recent, this scholarship canbe divided broadly into works that evaluate county-level votes on Confed-erate flag referendums, those that consider state legislators’ votes onchanging the Confederate flag/relocating it/removing it, and those survey-ing opinions on certain variants of the Southern Cross. The last set ofstudies are most germane to our current analysis since we rely on surveydata to assess the opinions of South Carolinians before and after theremoval of the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds inColumbia. Not surprisingly, because most of the contemporary fightswaged over the Confederate flag have occurred in Georgia, Mississippi,and South Carolina, these studies typically focus on some population inthese states.

Regardless of the specific type of analysis, it is apparent that race,whether measured at the district level (for state legislators), the countylevel, or the individual level, registers a large effect on opinions toward theConfederate flag. Larger black populations in aggregate-level analysescorrelate with opposition to Confederate symbolism43 because AfricanAmericans strongly oppose the Confederate battle flag,44 and lawmakersrepresenting substantial black constituencies vote against pro-Confederatelegislation.45 We also suspect that white politicians have played the “racecard” by supporting the Confederate flag without specifically mentioningthe racial history associated with this powerful symbol.46 Given the closeconnection between race and partisanship, Republican legislators are oftenfound to be more supportive of the Confederate flag,47 but not always

43Karahan and Shughart, “Under Two Flags”; Klinkner, “Waving the ‘White’ Flag,” 647; Leib andWebster,“Black, White or Green?”; and Reksulak, Karahan, and Shughart, “Flags of Our Fathers.”44Cooper and Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support.”45Bullock and Hood, “When Southern Symbolism Meets the Pork Barrel”; Reksulak, Karahan, andShughart, “Flags of Our Fathers”; and Webster and Leib, “Whose South Is It Anyway?”46Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).47Reksulak, Karahan, and Shughart, “Flags of Our Fathers”; and Webster and Leib, “Whose South Is ItAnyway?”


TABLE 1Sampling of Published Studies Examining Opinions on the Confederate Flag

Author(s)

Unit of

Analysis Coverage Analysis Findings

Clark (1997) Individual GA

campaign

donors

Regression Among white campaign donors, racial

attitudes had the greatest effect on

attitudes toward the GA flag.

Reingold and Wike

(1998)

Individual GA

residents

Regression Among white GA respondents, racial

attitudes had the greatest effect on

attitudes toward the GA flag.

Webster and Leib

(2001)

State

legislator

SC House

Members

Regression On two legislative measures dealing with

Confederate symbolism, black district

voting-age population and party had the

greatest effect on SC House member

voting behavior.

Klinkner (2001) County MS

counties

Correlation Support for keeping the MS state flag was

highly correlated with white county voting-

age population.

Karahan and Shughart

(2004)

County MS

counties

Regression County demographics for race, education,

income, and presidential vote influenced

the vote on the MS flag referendum.

Orey (2004) Individual MS college

students

Regression Among white college students, racial

attitudes had the greatest influence on

support for the MS flag.

Bullock and Hood

(2005)

State

legislator

GA

legislators

Regression District racial composition and district

spending for education influenced GA

legislators’ voting on changing the GA flag.

Cooper and Knotts

(2006)

Individual National Regression Race, racial attitudes, region, and ideology

had greatest influence on support for the

Confederate flag.

Glaser (2006) Individual SC regis-

tered vo-

ters

Regression White respondents were more supportive of

a compromise on the Confederate flag if

told that a majority supported such a

decision (not if told that blacks and whites

negotiated the compromise).

Reksulak, Karahan,

and Shughart (2007)

State

legislator,

county

GA

legislators;

counties

Regression District racial composition and party had the

most impact on legislators’ voting on

changing the GA flag. County

demographics for race, education,

gubernatorial vote, and density had most

effect on the GA flag referendum.

Hutchings, Walton,

and Benjamin

(2010)

Individual GA

residents

Regression Given three different frames, the one

explicitly racist frame made white male

Georgians more supportive of the GA flag

and less likely to identify with the

Democratic Party.

Ehrlinger et al. (2011) Individual FL college

students

ANCOVA Exposure to the Confederate flag made

white college students less likely to vote

for Barack Obama and more negative

toward African Americans.

Leib and Webster

(2012)

County MS

counties

Correlation County demographics for race, income,

religious conservatives, density, married,

young voters, and manufacturing

influenced the vote on the MS flag

referendum.


(some studies find no difference between white Democrats and whiteRepublicans voting on Confederate flag legislation).48

Most of the survey-based studies omit black respondents because it istaken as a given that they will be unanimously opposed to Confederatesymbols. Nonetheless, the inclusion of a dummy for a respondent’s raceprovides insight into just how polarized black and white attitudes are.49 Ashortcoming of some of these studies is the sampling frame, which limitsthe generalizability of the findings. For instance, Clark50 relied on a mailsurvey of white Georgia campaign donors; Orey’s51 study was limited towhite college students enrolled in Mississippi universities, and, similarly,Ehrlinger et al.52 surveyed Florida undergraduates (but included blackrespondents). Putting aside the issue of representativeness, these studiesare rather illuminating. One would expect social desirability to maskracially prejudiced attitudes,53 but in fact, the respondents in these surveysexhibit a very high propensity to favor the Confederate flag (or to opposeBarack Obama/African Americans because of exposure to the Confederateflag in the experimental study by Ehrlinger et al.54) because of eitherracially conservative beliefs55 or downright racist attitudes.56

In fact, in a representative sample of white Georgians, under a blatantlyracist framingof theConfederate flag (using anexperimental surveydesign),white male respondents weremost supportive of the emblem and less likelyto identify with the Democratic Party.57 By contrast, white female respond-ents did not exhibit notable variation in their opinion of theConfederate flagbased on their exposure to different frames.58 In another survey of whiteGeorgians, separating out the effects of a measure of southern identity/heritage from an index capturing racial attitudes revealed that the lattervariable proved highly significant in affecting opinion on theGeorgia flag.59

48See Bullock and Hood, “When Southern Symbolism Meets the Pork Barrel.”49Cooper and Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support”; and Glaser, “Public Support for Political Compromise.”50Clark, “Explaining Elite Attitudes.”51Orey, “White Racial Attitudes.”52Joyce E. Ehrlinger, Ashby Plant, Richard P. Eibach, Corey J. Columb, Joanna L. Goplen, Jonathan W.Kuntsman, and David A. Butz, “How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote forBarack Obama,” Political Psychology 32 (February 2011): 131–146.53JamesH.Kuklinski,Michael D. Cobb, andMartinGilens, “Racial Attitudes and the ‘NewSouth,’” Journalof Politics 59 (May 1997): 323–349.54Ehrlinger et al., “How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama.”55Clark, “Explaining Elite Attitudes.”56Ehrlinger et al., “How Exposure to the Confederate Flag Affects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama”;and Orey, “White Racial Attitudes.”57Hutchings, Walton, and Benjamin, “The Impact of Explicit Racial Cues.”58Ibid.59Reingold and Wike, “Confederate Symbols.”


In light of these previous studies of opinions toward the Confederateflag, we use survey data to account for many of the leading factors expectedto influence views on this divisive issue. Like others,60 we see value incontrolling for a respondent’s race before moving on to an assessment ofwhite attitudes toward the Rebel flag. In the case of white respondents,because of the vast changes in partisan politics in the American South, weanticipate that several variables should condition attitudes toward theConfederate flag, particularly measures of partisanship, ideology, racialconservatism, religion, southern identity, and education. To elaborate onthese relationships, we now turn to our data and methods for evaluatingSouth Carolinian opinions on the Confederate flag.

DATA AND METHODSFor about a decade, from 1992 to 2001, the University of North Carolinaadministered the Southern Focus Poll (SFP), which was conducted bian-nually in the spring and fall and contained a representative nationalsample of southern and northern respondents.61 The SFP routinelyincluded a smorgasbord of questions tapping into southern cultural iden-tities. For a handful of polls, the SFP posed the following question:

Some people say the Confederate flag reminds them of white supremacyand racial conflict. Other people say the Confederate flag is a symbol ofSouthern heritage and pride. Do you think the flag is more a symbol ofracial conflict or of southern pride?

The response options were “1. Racial Conflict; 2. Southern Pride; 3. NoOpinion/NoAnswer.”This questionwas asked of respondents in four SFPsadministered more than 20 years ago. Omitting the third response option,we pooled the answers to this question across four groups: whitesoutherners, black southerners, white South Carolinians, and black SouthCarolinians.

We found that 85.4 percent of white southerners said the flag was moreabout southern pride than racial conflict, but just 38.9 percent of blacksoutherners agreed. In terms of whites, the story is quite similar in SouthCarolina: 86.9 percent of whites said the flag was more about southernpride than racial conflict. However, we discovered a more substantialdifference comparing black respondents in South Carolina with black

60See Cooper and Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support.”61The University of North Carolina’s Southern Focus Poll (SFP) was funded through a partnership with theAtlanta Journal-Constitution. Spearheaded by longtime University of North Carolina sociologist JohnShelton Reed, the SFP provided a decade of valuable public opinion data on the American South.


southernersmore generally: just 10 percent of black South Carolinians saidthe flag was more about southern pride than racial conflict.

To determine how opinions may have changed after the Charlestonshooting, we included this question on the September 2015Winthrop Poll.The WP is a representative probability sample of South Carolina residentsthat is conducted up to four times per year and uses professionally trainedcallers so that both landlines and wireless phones may be sampled (auto-mated polls may not call wireless phones, and the Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention reports that 52 percent of South Carolina adultslive in a wireless-only household).62 We discovered that 70.8 percent ofwhite South Carolinians said the Confederate flag was more aboutsouthern pride than racial conflict. Recall that 86.9 percent of white SouthCarolinians answered southern pride based on the SFP results. Althoughwe want to be cautious in comparing the results from opinion polls takenmore than 20 years apart, it appears that fewer white South Carolinianswere making a heritage argument following the Charleston shooting.There did not appear to be a big change in how black South Caroliniansanswered this question, however. According to the WP results, only13.5 percent of black South Carolinians said the flag was more aboutsouthern identity than racial conflict.

Given the significance of the Charleston tragedy and its swift politicalramifications, the September 2015 WP placed a heavy emphasis on ques-tions gauging opinions on the Confederate flag and its removal from theSouth Carolina State House grounds. We are also fortunate to have Con-federate flag questions from the November 2014 WP, when the issue wascomparably dormant. Both WP surveys (November 2014 and Septem-ber 2015) were based on representative samples of South Carolinians. InTable 2, we display the descriptive results for responses to five questionsassessing opinions on the Confederate flag: “(1) positive/negative view in2014 (2) continue flying/not continue flying in 2014 (3) continue flying/not continue flying in 2015 (4) approve/disapprove flying before summerin 2015 (5) wrong decision/right decision to remove flag in 2015.”The dataare confined to blacks and whites and show overall opinion and opinionsaccording to race.

In 2014, 54 percent of respondents held a negative view of the Confed-erate flag, but we find substantial racial polarization, as 58 percent ofwhites held a positive view versus 82 percent of blacks harboring a negative

62The WP is a charter member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research’s TransparencyInitiative. For more information on the Winthrop Poll, see http://www.winthrop.edu/winthroppoll/,accessed 7 October 2017.


view. The next two questions in 2014 and 2015, respectively, were wordedvery similarly and thus offer a revealing contrast in themovement of publicopinion. Prefaced with the brief historical context of the Rebel flag beingmoved to the site of a Confederate memorial on the State House grounds,in 2014, respondents were asked whether the banner should or should notcontinue flying.63 In 2015, respondents were then asked whether theypersonally thought the Confederate flag should continue flying after itsremoval from the StateHouse grounds. In 2014, 65 percent of respondentsfavored the flag continuing to fly over the Confederate memorial on theState House grounds, with 77 percent of whites holding this view versus69 percent of blacks opposed. About a year later, in the wake of theCharleston church massacre, only 34 percent of respondents thoughtthe flag should continue flying after the legislature had it removed, with

TABLE 2South Carolinians’ Opinions on the Confederate Flag, 2014 and 2015

View of

Confederate

Flag (2014)

Should or Should

Not Continue to Fly

Confederate Flag

(2014)

Should or Should

Not Continue to Fly

Confederate Flag

(2015)

Before Summer,

Approve or

Disapprove of

Flag Flying (2015)

Right or Wrong

Decision for Legislature to

Remove Flag (2015)

Positive View Should Continue

Flying

Should Continue

Flying

Approve Flag

Flying

Wrong Decision to

Remove Flag

All¼ 46% All¼ 65% All¼ 34% All¼ 46% All¼ 31%

Whites¼ 58% Whites¼ 77% Whites¼ 46% Whites¼ 61% Whites¼ 43%

Blacks¼ 18% Blacks¼ 31% Blacks¼ 5% Blacks¼ 11% Blacks¼ 4%

N (249) N (503) N (290) N (376) N (272)

Negative

View

Should Not Continue

Flying

Should Not Continue

Flying

Disapprove Flag

Flying

Right Decision to

Remove Flag

All¼ 54% All¼ 35% All¼ 66% All¼ 54% All¼ 69%

Whites¼ 42% Whites¼ 23% Whites¼ 54% Whites¼ 39% Whites¼ 57%

Blacks¼ 82% Blacks¼ 69% Blacks¼ 95% Blacks¼ 89% Blacks¼ 96%

N (292) N (271) N (554) N (440) N (596)

Source: All data are from the Winthrop Poll, administered in November 2014 and September 2015.

Note: All results shown were generated with the sample weights on. The questions for columns 2 (in 2014) and

3 (in 2015) are not exactly the same, as explained in the text. In column 1, positive and negative views were

collapsed for “very” and “somewhat” responses and the neutral responsewas omitted from the distribution. For

columns 2 and 3, a neutral response (which the respondent volunteered) was omitted from the distribution. Data

display the 100 percent split for each category of respondents—that is, if 90 percent of whites hold a positive

view of the flag, then 10 percent of whites hold a negative view.

63The exact wording of the question is as follows: “From the year 1962 until the year 2000, the ConfederateFlag flew above the dome over the South Carolina StateHouse, where the South Carolina Legislaturemeets.In the year 2000, it was taken down from the dome, but still flies on the State House grounds next to amonument to South Carolina’s Confederate dead. Do you think the Confederate Flag should or should notcontinue to be flown on the grounds of the South Carolina State House?”


54 percent of whites and fully 95 percent of blacks favoring its removal.Clearly, the tragedy in Charlestonmobilized opinion against flying the flag.Notice, however, that when the question was prefaced with “before sum-mer,” more respondents approved of the flag flying (61 percent of whites)even though this question was asked in September 2015.64 Finally, weaskedwhether respondents agreedwith the legislature’s decision to removethe flag. Here we find the most opposition to the Confederate flag, as only31 percent of respondents opposed the decision to remove the flag with57 percent of whites and 96 percent of blacks favoring its removal.

Based on the summary statistics in Table 2, we go a step further byconducting multivariate analysis of opinions toward the Confederate flag.Although we modeled responses to all five questions, we present only themodels evaluating responses to the two questions about whether theConfederate flag should continue to fly on State House grounds (questions2 and 3 in Table 2).65 As a reminder, one question was asked in 2014,before the Charleston church shooting, and one question was asked in2015, in the wake of the shooting. In the following analyses, we scale thedependent variable in multiple regressions as follows: 1¼ continue flying,0¼do not continue flying. Hence, our dependent variable is coded in apro-flag direction. In total, we run four regressions because for eachdependent variable, we evaluate opinions with and then without AfricanAmerican respondents (a full model and whites-only model). We do this inorder to first assess racial polarization in the full models and then examinethe variation in opinions among white respondents.

With the exception of the race variable (White: 1¼white, 0¼ black), inevery model, we include the same covariates: Racial Conservatism; Ideol-ogy (1¼ extremely liberal to 7¼ extremely conservative); Party Identifica-tion (1¼ strong Democrat to 7¼ strong Republican); Born Again (1¼ yes,0¼ otherwise); Native Southerner (1¼ yes, 0¼ otherwise); ConvertedSoutherner (1¼ yes, 0¼ otherwise); Tea Party Approve (1¼ approve ofTea Party, 0¼ otherwise); Female (1¼ female, 0¼male); Age (in years,ranging from 18 to 99); and Education (1¼ less than high school, 2¼highschool graduate/GED equivalent, 3¼ some college, 4¼ two-year technicalcollege graduate, 5¼ four-year college graduate, 6¼postgraduate).

64The entirety of the question is as follows: “In 1962, the Confederate battle flag was placed over the dome ofthe South Carolina State House, where the legislature meets. It was removed from the dome in 2000 andflew at amemorial on the State House grounds. This summer, it was removed completely from State Housegrounds and sent to amuseum. Before this summer, did you approve or disapprove of the confederate battleflag flying on the SC State House grounds?”65Although not shown,multivariatemodels for the other questions in Table 2 produced very similar results,and we will make them available upon request.


Someof these variables need further explanation.Racial Conservatism isbased on the following question: “[D]o you feel that generations of slaveryanddiscriminationdoordonotmake it difficult forBlacks towork theirwayout of the lower class? Do you feel that way Strongly or Somewhat?” Thevariable is coded 1¼ strongly DOmake it difficult, 2¼ somewhat DOmakeit difficult, 3¼ somewhat do NOT make it difficult, 4¼ strongly do NOTmake it difficult.Ahigher value equals amore racially conservative response.Similar to previous research,66 this proxy for racial attitudes should exhibit asubstantial andpositive influenceon thedependentvariables (that is, amorefavorable opinion toward the Confederate flag).

We also include two variables that tap into regional identity: NativeSoutherner and Converted Southerner, with the omitted comparison cate-gory being Non-Southerner. Respondents native to the South should bemore favorable toward the Confederate flag, although the evidence thatthis is the case in past studies is mixed.67 We also distinguish betweenrespondents who relocated to the South/South Carolina and embracedtheir new culture by identifying as a Converted Southerner versus thosewho migrated to the South/South Carolina from a northern state andcontinue to view themselves as aNon-Southerner. It is likely that southernconverts hold more positive views of the Confederate flag compared withnorthern in-migrants who do not feel a cultural affinity with the South.

Regarding the expectations for the other variables, because of themodern partisan realignment of southern politics,68 we expect thatRepublican affiliates will be more favorable in their opinions towardthe Southern Cross. Likewise, because of the tight linkage betweenideology and partisanship,69 conservatives should harbor more positiveimpressions of the Confederate flag. However, because religious groupswere active in lobbying for the removal of the Rebel flag (including thepolitically influential Southern Baptist Convention70), born-againrespondents may exhibit more negative views of the emblem.71 Since

66Clark, “Explaining Elite Attitudes”; Cooper andKnotts, “Region, Race, and Support”; Orey, “White RacialAttitudes”; and Reingold and Wike, “Confederate Symbols.”67Compare Clark, “ExplainingElite Attitudes,”withEhrlinger et al., “HowExposure to the Confederate FlagAffects Willingness to Vote for Barack Obama.”68Black and Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans; and Nicholas A. Valentino and David O. Sears, “OldTimes There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South,” AmericanJournal of Political Science 49 (July 2005): 672–688.69Matthew Levendusky, The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives BecameRepublicans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).70See Woliver, Ledford, and Dolan, “The South Carolina Confederate Flag.”71Perhaps another reason for this expectation is that the Charleston shooting took place in a house ofworship and therefore was likely to prime born-again respondents to oppose a symbol associated with suchan abhorrent act of violence.


the Tea Party movement is aligned somewhere along the far-right fringeof the Republican Party,72 these individuals may be more favorabletoward the Confederate flag. Moreover, one of the flag’s biggest support-ers in the South Carolina Legislature was Senator Lee Bright, a Tea Partyfavorite.73 As for female respondents, given the split in opinions amongwhite male and white female Georgians,74 we anticipate that in ourmodels confined to white respondents, women will be less supportiveof the Confederate flag.

Based on prior studies, in the case of white southern respondents, agehas exhibited both favorable75 and unfavorable76 opinions toward theConfederate flag; Cooper and Knotts77 found that older non-southernerswere more opposed to the flag, but age did not influence the views ofsoutherners. Reingold andWike78 offer two explanations why older south-erners (whites only) were more opposed to the Georgia state flag. Ratherthan reiterate their reasoning, we expect older South Carolinians will alsohave more unfavorable views of the Confederate flag, but for an entirelydifferentmotivation: “flag fatigue.”79 It strikes us that older Palmetto Stateresidents may be tired of the fight over the flag and therefore should bemore welcoming of its removal. Finally, consistent with previousresearch,80 and since education is correlated with greater racial toler-ance,81 the higher educated should be significantly more opposed to flyingthe Confederate flag.

RESULTSTo explore perceptions about the Confederate flag in more detail, weestimated a probit model including the aforementioned independent var-iables: white, racial conservatism, ideology, party identification, bornagain, native southerner, converted southerner, tea party approve, female,age, and education. In addition to presenting the model coefficients andaccompanying standard errors for each regression, we also present

72Christopher S. Parker andMatt A. Barreto,Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party andReactionaryPolitics in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).73Jamie Self, “Tea Party Leaders Line Up for Lee Bright,” The State (Columbia, SC), 20 February 2015.74Hutchings, Walton, and Benjamin, “The Impact of Explicit Racial Cues.”75Clark, “Explaining Elite Attitudes.”76Reingold and Wike, “Confederate Symbols.”77Cooper and Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support.”78Reingold and Wike, “Confederate Symbols,” 577.79Glaser, “Public Support for Political Compromise.”80Cooper and Knotts, “Region, Race, and Support”; and Reingold and Wike, “Confederate Symbols.”81William H. Flanigan, Nancy H. Zingale, Elizabeth A. Theiss-Morse, and Michael Wagner, PoliticalBehavior of the American Electorate, 13th ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2015).


predicted probabilities of the likelihood that an individual favored flyingthe Confederate flag based on the observed value approach.82

Recall that our first research questionwas to explore the individual-levelfactors that explained support for the South Carolina Confederate flagbefore the Charleston church shooting. Table 3 displays the results for ourestimates of support for theConfederate flag before theCharleston tragedy.The results of our full model appear in the second column of Table 3. Raceis certainly a factor in opinions about the Confederate flag, as whites are

TABLE 3Continue to Fly the Confederate Flag on State House Grounds, November 2014

Continue to Fly

Confederate

Flag (Full

Model)

Change in

Probability

(Full Model)

Low to

High

(Full

Model)

Continue to Fly

Confederate

Flag (Whites

Only)

Change in

Probability

(Whites

Only)

Low to

High

(Whites

Only)

White .816�� þ.24 .49–.73 —

(.178)

Racial conservatism .132�� þ.11 .60–.71 .141�� þ.11 .68–.79

(.040) (.048)

Ideology .173�� þ.29 .50–.79 .220�� þ.36 .52–.88

(.041) (.051)

Party identification .101�� þ.17 .59–.76 .061

(.041) (.046)

Born again –.014 .043

(.141) (.176)

Native Southerner .587�� þ.15 .57–.72 .728�� þ.18 .64–.82

(.197) (.222)

Converted Southerner .225 .241

(.228) (.245)

Tea Party approve .167 .190

(.177) (.196)

Female .204 .234

(.130) (.157)

Age .001 –.001

(.003) (.004)

Education –.146�� –.18 .78–.60 –.177�� –.18 .87–.69

(.043) (.052)

Constant –1.79�� –.916��

(.328) (.418)

N 675 535

Pseudo R2 .296 .255

Source: Winthrop Poll, November 2014.

Note: Entries for columns are probit coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. All models were

computed using sample weights.�p � .10; �� p � .05; �� p � .01 (two-tailed).

82Michael J. Hanmer and Kerem Ozan Kalkan, “Behind the Curve: Clarifying the Best Approach toCalculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects from Limited Dependent Variable Models,”American Journal of Political Science 57 (January 2013): 263–277.


significantly more likely than blacks to favor the flag flying. In 2014, thelikelihood of favoring continuing to fly the flag is .49 for blacks versus .73for whites. The effect of being a native southerner also has a strong effect onflying the flag, moving from .57 for non-southerners to .72 for nativesoutherners. Likewise, party identification and ideology are also significantpredictors of support for continuing to fly the flag. Across the range of partyidentification, the probability moves from .59 (strong Democrats) to .76(strong Republicans). Conservative respondents support the flag at higherrates as well, moving from .50 (extremely liberal) to .79 (extremely con-servative). Racial conservatism also has a positive effect on continuing tofly the flag: the least racially conservative respondent has a .60 probabilitycompared with .71 for the most racially conservative. Lastly, the effect ofeducation is negative and significant: going from .78 (least educated) to .60(most educated) with respect to the likelihood of favoring continuing to flythe flag.

The fifth column in Table 3 displays our probit estimates for the whites-only model. The findings are quite similar to what we discovered in the fullmodel. The significant predictors of continuing to fly the flag are nativesoutherner status (þ.18 change in probability), ideology (þ.36 change inprobability), racial conservatism (þ.11 change in probability), and educa-tion (–.18 change in probability). We should note, however, that this is theonly model in which party identification fails to register a significant effecton opinion toward the Confederate flag.

Table 4 displays the results for the likelihood of continuing to flag theflag after its removal in 2015. These results help us explore our secondresearch question, determining the individual-level factors that explainsupport for the Confederate flag after the Charleston church shooting. Inthe full model, the probability difference between blacks and whites is .31,with a 10 percent chance that African Americans agree to continue flyingthe flag versus a .41 probability among whites. Again, we see substantialeffects with respect to ideology, party identification, racial conservatism,native southerner, and education. Unlike the findings in Table 3, we nowsee that older respondents are much less likely to agree that the flag shouldcontinue flying, moving from a probability of .45 for the youngest respon-dent (18) to just .27 for the oldest respondent (99). Also, comparedwith theresults in Table 3 in 2014, in Table 4 in 2015, support for continuing to flythe flag is markedly lower irrespective of the particular variable of statisti-cal significance. Indeed, only in the case of the least educated do we find aprobability above .50 (at .55).

Not surprisingly, and true for all of the models limited to whiterespondents, support for the Confederate flag is higher than in the full


models that include African Americans. For the predicted probabilities inthe whites-only model in Table 4, at the highest levels of racial conserva-tism (.51), ideology (.56), and party identification (.50), at least half of theserespondents favor the flag continuing to fly above the StateHouse grounds.Interestingly, and in keeping with our expectation that born-again indi-viduals would be less supportive of the Confederate flag continuing to fly,this is in fact the case (a �.08 decline in probability for born-againindividuals). Lastly, the youngest respondents (at .57) and least educated(at .66) are much more in favor of having the flag continue to fly, withmaximum probability differences registering �.26 and �.38, respectively.

Finally, in order to highlight themarked decline in support for flying theConfederate flag in South Carolina before (in November 2014) and after(in September 2015) the Charleston church shooting, we present Figure 1.

TABLE 4Continue to Fly the Confederate Flag on State House Grounds, September 2015

Continue to Fly

Confederate

Flag (Full

Model)

Change in

Probability

(Full Model)

Low to

High

(Full

Model)

Continue to Fly

Confederate

Flag (Whites

Only)

Change in

Probability

(Whites

Only)

Low to

High

(Whites

Only)

White 1.28�� þ.31 .10–.41 —

(.240)

Racial conservatism .245�� þ.20 .23–.43 .201�� þ.20 .31–.51

(.057) (.061)

Ideology .148�� þ.24 .20–.44 .189�� þ.36 .20–.56

(.041) (.045)

Party identification .106�� þ.17 .25–.42 .097�� þ.18 .32–.50

(.041) (.044)

Born again –.205 –.264� –.08 .49–.41

(.139) (.148)

Native Southerner .435� þ.11 .29–.40 .393

(.234) (.254)

Converted Southerner .189 .129

(.256) (.272)

Tea Party approve –.000 –.025

(.143) (.147)

Female –.146 –.091

(.137) (.139)

Age –.009�� –.18 .45–.27 –.011�� –.26 .57–.31

(.003) (.004)

Education –.247�� –.33 .55–.22 –.238�� –.38 .66–.28

(.041) (.042)

Constant –2.18�� –.835��

(.389) (.424)

N 722 565

Pseudo R2 .307 .190

Source: Winthrop Poll, September 2015.

Note: Entries for columns are probit coefficients with robust standard errors in parentheses. All models were

computed using sample weights.�p � .10; �� p � .05; �� p � .01 (two-tailed).


Figure 1 displays the predicted probability of support for flying the flagaccording to the six variables (respondent race, racial conservatism, partyidentification, ideology, native status, and level of education) in whichopinion toward flying the Southern Cross registered statistical significancein both the 2014 and 2015 full models (as shown in Tables 3 and 4,respectively). Most of these variable classifications are categorical, andhere we show differences for the minimum and maximum values. Forinstance, we display predicted probabilities for the far-left (strong Demo-crat) and far-right (strong Republican) positions on the seven-point partyidentification scale. Mobilization of opinion in favor of removing theConfederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds is palpable.Whereas almost every type of respondent in Figure 1 favored continuingflying the flag in 2014 (the exception being African Americans and ex-tremely liberal respondents who split 50/50), in 2015, only the leasteducated still favored flying the Southern Cross.

CONCLUSIONIn the 1944 case of Smith v. Allwright, which ruled the white primaryunconstitutional, it was the Deep South states that worked the hardest todeny black suffrage even after the U.S. Supreme Court had spoken.83More

FIGURE 1Drastic Decline in Support for Flying the Confederate Flag in South Carolina between 2014 and 2015

Note: Data display the predicted probability of supporting the flying of the Confederate flag in SouthCarolina for each type of respondent based on the full model results displayed in Table 3 for 2014

(before the Charleston church shooting) and Table 4 for 2015 (after the Charleston church shooting).

83Remarking on South Carolina’s efforts at skirting the Allwright decision, “United States District Judge J.Waties Waring, a Charlestonian of impeccable South Carolina connections,” had this to say: “It is time forSouth Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the Americanway of conducting elections” (quoted in Key, Southern Politics, 628).


recently, the historian David Goldfield84 penned a book titled Still Fight-ing the Civil War. The Deep South states have clung to their “Old South”past longer and tighter than the others,85 and the fight over theRebel flag isperhaps the most prominent example. In 2017, Mississippi held the dis-tinction of being the only state to display the St. Andrew’s Cross on its flag.

TheCivilWar only lasted four years, but a flag representing the southernside of that fight has divided black and white South Carolinians for morethan half a century. The Confederate battle flag has taken on many mean-ings, but southern unity is not one of them. The racial split over thesymbolism of the Southern Cross has proven intractable, but an inexplica-ble and gruesome crime became the catalyst for rendering the Rebel flag amuseum piece.

In this article, we have documented several political histories of theConfederate flag and looked specifically at South Carolinian opinionstoward it, including its removal from the State House grounds. It tookmore than 38 years to move the flag from atop the Capitol dome to aConfederate memorial and then another decade and a half to discard it alltogether. Public opinion shows strong splits on the Confederate battle flag,both in terms of its meaning and state-sanctioned display. Not only doesthis dividemanifest in black andwhite, but also it splits whites with respectto demographics and sociopolitical attitudes. There is massive irony in thefact that the Rebel Cross now generates more favorable impressions fromthose aligned with the Republican Party, the same party a defeated Con-federate South raised this flag against. Furthermore, it was the Republicanleadership of Indian American governor Nikki Haley that ensured the flagwould be removed.

It appears that the Charleston church shooting sparked a significantchange in views toward flying the Confederate flag.86 It was just the kind ofevent capable of galvanizing opinion decidedly in one direction as aconsequence of elites taking a strong stand against the Southern Cross.87

Our surveys indicate that prior to the Charleston church shooting,77 percent of white South Carolinians thought the Confederate flag should

84David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 2002).85See McKee and Springer, “A Tale of ‘Two Souths.’”86Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility thatmanywhite SouthCarolinians registered agreementwiththe decision to furl the Confederate flag on account of social desirability (Kuklinski, Cobb, and Gilens,“Racial Attitudes”). Nonetheless, to the extent that surveys like ours have captured a dramatic shift inopinions toward the Southern Cross, this undoubtedly aided in the successful push to have the flag takendown.87John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992).


continue flying over the State House grounds. After this senseless tragedy,57 percent of whites agreed with the legislature’s decision to take down theSouthern Cross (see Table 2). Most important, even if there remainsnowhere near a consensus position among the mass public in the PalmettoState,88 its elected leadership put the flag issue to rest. In our view, if onlysymbolically, this political action represents closing another door on theracially insensitive “Old South” and more fully embracing the promise of aracially tolerant “New South.”

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88Wewould be remiss if we failed tomention a smaller but nonetheless significant postscript to our story. Atthe time of this writing, there was a Confederate flag controversy brewing on the Citadel campus inCharleston, South Carolina. A Confederate naval jack hangs in Summerall Chapel, and a campaign called“Take It Down Now” has gained momentum (see Jeff Hartsell, “Citadel ‘Take It Down Now’ CampaignTargets Medal of Honor Bowl over Confederate Flag,” Post and Courier, 9 March 2016). The school is infavor of removing the flag but is powerless to do so because under South Carolina’s Heritage Act, thelegislature must vote to take it down (see Dave Munday and Diane Knich, “City Faces ContinuedControversy over Confederate Naval Jack on Citadel Campus,” Post and Courier, 8 March 2016). In short,the Confederate flag controversy continues, and it probably will until all state-sanctioned displays (forexample, Mississippi’s state flag) come to an end.�A previous version of our article was presented at the Citadel Symposium on Southern Politics inCharleston, South Carolina, 2016. We thank our discussants, John Clark and Joe Stewart, for their helpfulcomments. We also thank Allie Briggs, the Social and Behavioral Research Lab operations manager, andWinthrop University and the West Forum on Politics and Policy for their financial support.


the journal of public and international affairsanthony j. mcgann, charles anthony smith, michael...

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