Poll Finds Texans Split 50/50 on Removal of Confederate Monuments
Half of Texans believe that Confederate statues and monuments on public property should be moved to a museum or removed altogether from public view, according to a new opinion poll.
Nationally, the Black Lives Matter movement has given urgency to long-running debates over monuments to the Confederacy, Confederate leaders, and Confederate war dead.
Texas has dozens of Confederate monuments throughout the state, including about a dozen on the Capitol grounds. Numerous roads and schools also are named for Confederate generals.
In June, the University of Texas commissioned international polling firm YouGov to survey 1,444 registered voters, who were then matched down to a sample of 1,200.
One of the survey questions asked, “Which of the following is closest to your opinion regarding Confederate statues and monuments on public property?”
The options given were, “They should be removed from public view,” “moved to a museum or other site where they can be presented in historical context,” “remain where they are with historical context provided,” or “remain where they are unchanged.”
One in five Texans favored complete removal from public view, and nearly a third of Texans, 32%, said they would prefer to see Confederate monuments moved to a museum.
According to Jim Henson and Joshua Blank, the UT researchers behind the poll, this result is a “marked reversal” from a 2017 poll, when only 38% of Texans supported removal of statues from public property.
Only one in five Texans now favors leaving the statues as they are, according to the poll. Another 23% said the statues could remain where they are if additional historical context was provided.
Black Texans were more than twice as likely as White Texans to say that they thought the statues should be removed, with 82% advocating for moving the statues to a museum or outright removal from public view, compared to only 45% of Whites.
A majority of Hispanic Texans favored one of the middle options of moving the statues to a museum or adding historical context. Slightly more men than women thought the statuary should remain unchanged.
According to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, the survey has a margin of error of +/- 2.83 percentage points.
Respondents completed the poll online. YouGov panelists are recruited through web advertising campaigns, permission-based email campaigns, partner-sponsored solicitations, telephone-to-web recruitment, and mail-to-web recruitment.
According to the survey methodology, “In practice, a search in Google may prompt an active YouGov advertisement soliciting opinion on the search topic. At the conclusion of the short survey respondents are invited to join the YouGov panel in order to receive and participate in additional surveys…”
Originally published at https://www.honestaustin.com on July 7, 2020.
