“Birther” is a pejorative term used to refer to individuals who believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to serve as president. Official records in Hawaii indicate that Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father. Birthers believe Obama’s actual place of birth to be in Kenya.
In an April 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, 58 percent of Americans indicated that they believed Obama was born in the United States, while 20 percent believed he was born in another country and another 23 percent were not sure. A year later, a YouGov poll conducted by Adam Berinsky of MIT in April 2011 produced similar results: 55 percent believed Obama was born in the United States, 15 percent claimed he was not, and 30 percent were not sure.
In May 2011, responding to a series of groundless remarks about his place of birth (including accusations from billionaire celebrity Donald Trump), President Obama publicly released his official birth certificate. In a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted soon afterward, 70 percent of Americans now believed that Obama was born in Hawaii, and 86 percent said that their best guess was that Obama was born in the United States. Of the 10 percent who still believed Obama was born abroad, most only indicated a suspicion of this, while 1 percent claimed that they had seen “solid evidence” of an overseas birth. Only 7 percent of Democrats in the Washington Post poll thought that Obama might have been born overseas (compared to 15% a year before). Republicans were more likely to be skeptical of Obama’s birthplace (14%), but this number, too, was down substantially from a year before (when it was 31%).
Berinsky, too, found a brief surge in the number of Americans who believed Obama was born in the United States after the release of the long form of the birth certificate—67 percent of Americans in his poll now felt that the president was a natural-born citizen (with Republicans reporting lower levels of persuasion relative to Democrats). However, the effects of this new information were short-lived. By January of 2012, only 59 percent of Americans he polled believed the president was born in the United States, and by July 2012, the number was back to 55 percent.
In the Campaign of 2012, 51 percent of GOP primary voters believed that Obama was not born in the United States, according to a poll conducted by Public Policy Polling (whereas 28% were sure that he was). Sarah Palin’s and Mike Huckabee’s supporters exhibited the highest rates of birthers.
Suspicions about the country of Obama’s birth are more common among those who seek out conservative media sources. A recent Fairleigh Dickinson poll found that while 19 percent of Americans believe that President Obama is probably not or definitely not an American citizen, 30 percent of Fox News viewers exhibit this belief. Other polls have found birtherism more common among self-identified members of the Tea Party movement, among Southerners, among rural residents, and among less-educated citizens. Emory researcher Alan Abramowitz found that birtherism was more common among whites than it was among nonwhites, and that predictors of birtherism include ideology and partisanship as well as racial resentment. Similarly, University of Delaware researcher Eric Hehman found that whites with higher rates of racial prejudice tended to rate Obama’s job performance more poorly and to evaluate him as less American than other respondents. Perceptions of Obama as Muslim, or as somehow not being a valid American citizen, appear to be driven, in part, by an element of racial animosity.
Birtherism may resurface in the Campaign of 2016 for several reasons. First, birther Donald Trump is now a highly visible candidate in the GOP primaries. Second, another GOP candidate, Texas senator Ted Cruz, finds himself in precisely the situation that birthers suggested Barack Obama faced: Ted Cruz had a Cuban-born father and a U.S.-born mother, and he himself was born in Canada. He is claiming birthright citizenship on the basis of his mother’s American citizenship (presumably, the same basis Obama could have used for claiming American citizenship even if he had, in fact, been born in Kenya, which he was not). In May 2015, GOP candidate Rand Paul ran an ad questioning Cruz’s eligibility for the presidency based on his Canadian citizenship.
Birtherism is also surfacing in state laws regarding ballot access. In May 2011, Republican Arizona governor Jan Brewer vetoed a bill that would have required any candidate running for public office in Arizona to produce their birth certificate. However, numerous other states are entertaining similar measures.
See also Campaign of 2008; Symbolic Racism
Abramowitz, Alan I. “The Race Factor: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions of Obama.” Sabato’s Crystal Ball, May 12, 2011. http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/aia2011051201. Accessed September 5, 2015.
Berinsky, Adam. “The Birthers Are (Still) Back.” July 11, 2012. YouGov US. https://today.yougov.com/news/2012/07/11/birthers-are-still-back/. Accessed September 5, 2015.
Cassino, Dan. “Ignorance, Partisanship Drive False Beliefs About Obama, Iraq.” Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind Poll, January 7, 2015. http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2015/false/. Accessed September 5, 2015.
Cohen, Jon. “Poll: Number of ‘Birthers’ Plummets.” Washington Post, May 5, 2011.
Hehman, Eric, Samuel L. Gaertner, and David F. Dovidio. “Evaluations of Presidential Performance: Race, Prejudice, and Perceptions of Americanism.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47, no. 2 (March 2011): 430–35.
Jensen, Tom. “Huckabee Tops GOP Field; 51% Are Birthers and Love Palin.” Public Policy Polling, February 15, 2011. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_US_0215.pdf. Accessed September 5, 2015.
New York Times/CBS News Poll: National Survey of Tea Party Supporters, April 5–12, 2010. http://documents.nytimes.com/new-york-timescbs-news-poll-national-survey-of-tea-party-supporters. Accessed September 5, 2015.