Southpaw 29: The Cost of Fandom is Cheap
What polling tells us about sports fans' proclivities.
Dear Readers,
In the past week, we’ve listened to various choruses of incredulous bleating from Republicans who are angry about Major League Baseball’s decision to move its All-Star Game and draft out of Georgia. We even were blessed with a quintessential Trump moment—a real throwback—when the former president appeared on Newsmax to discuss the decision.
Here he goes: “You know, you look at, you want to find a game, it’s on every channel, yet you can’t find anything. It’s the weirdest thing. It used to be a nice, easy thing to follow. And you know what I mean by that. It was on one network and it was nice and good and beautiful. Today, you don’t even know what the hell you’re watching. I would say boycott baseball. Why not?”
So true, sir, thank you! As far as we can tell, Trump’s core complaint has something to do with the advent of cable television, which seems only slightly ironic. Rather than sift through the mountain of think pieces that the commentariat churned out over the past week about MLB’s decision, we’d like to take a deep dive into some polling data that we think provides a new perspective on the issue. Enjoy!
-Calder and Ian
Why do avid MLB fans support the league moving the All-Star game out of Georgia?
Shortly after Major League Baseball announced its decision to move the league’s All-Star Game and draft out of Georgia, the polling shop Morning Consult put a poll into the field asking 2,200 Americans about their reactions to MLB’s decision. Here are the results:
Some of these findings are fairly unsurprising. Democrats (65 percent in favor, 10 percent opposed) are much more likely to support the decision than are Republicans (14 percent in favor, 56 percent opposed). Independents are split, 29 percent in favor to 29 percent opposed, with a large portion, 43 percent, indicating that they don’t know or don’t have an opinion. People of color (43 percent in favor, 20 percent opposed) are slightly more likely to support the decision than white, non-Hispanic people (38 percent in favor, 32 percent opposed).
The polling gets really interesting, though, when you drill down on responses from self-identified MLB fans. Morning Consult apparently thought so, too, and they titled their blog announcing the result of the poll “MLB Fans More Likely to Support League’s Decision to Move All-Star Game Than Oppose It.” The data pretty clearly supports their conclusion: while U.S. adults on the whole supported MLB’s decision by an 11-point margin—39 percent to 28 percent—that margin grew slightly to +13 percent among generic “sports fans” and expanded even further among self-identified MLB fans, who supported it by a margin of 48 percent to 31 percent (+17). Among “avid MLB fans,” the margin of support exploded to +34 percent, with 62 percent of respondents in support versus 28 percent in opposition.
The higher levels of support among MLB fans are notable since this phenomenon runs contrary to the conventional wisdom that Major League Baseball’s conservatism is somehow rooted in the conservatism of its fans. MLB has rightly earned a reputation as the most politically-allergic of all the professional sports leagues—recall, for instance, that it was one of the only sports where most of the championship-winning players happily visited Donald Trump in the White House without much public pushback. But this data suggests that the league’s fans are more open to principled political invention than we might have previously thought. With that in mind, it’s important to understand what’s driving this support, and what that might indicate about MLB’s fanbase more broadly.
There are a few possible explanations for the data. The more straightforward explanation would be that contrary to received wisdom, baseball’s fanbase is actually more left-leaning than the general population. A few contrarian cultural warriors have suggested as much in the past, arguing that as baseball hemorrhages fans to more red-blooded sports like football and hockey, the only people filling MLB stadiums are snowflakey liberals who have the leisure time to sit through four hours of a slow, tedious, and relatively non-violent baseball game.
However, the numbers just don’t bear this explanation out. According to another poll conducted by Morning Consult in September of 2020, baseball’s fanbase (defined as people with a “very favorable view” of at least one MLB team) is about evenly split along partisan lines, with 38 percent of fans identifying as Democrats, 30 percent identifying as Independents, and 32 identifying as Republicans. (Interestingly, the most right-wing fanbase, with 38 percent of fans identifying as Republican, was—you guessed it!—the Atlanta Braves.)
A second explanation is that people who are fans of Major League Baseball are more willing to support whatever the league does, regardless of their politics. In other words, fans’ loyalty to the sport might mean that when the commissioner makes a decision, they are more inclined to support it. This could be partially true, but baseball fans certainly haven’t been known to hold their tongue about their opposition to the league’s decisions in the past, so it seems unlikely that blind loyalty explains these numbers either.
A more compelling explanation is that fandom correlates less with partisanship or blind loyalty than it does with familiarity with the details and substance of MLB’s decision. It seems fair to assume, for instance, that both casual and diehard fans are familiar with MLB’s stated justification and motivation for the decision, neither of which have to do with fanning the flames of cancel culture or seeking to undermine the foundations of America’s democratic system by aiding and abetting in a socialist revolution, as Fox News talking heads have suggested. Assuming that 1) people who know more of the details of MLB’s decision are more likely to support it, and 2) that self-identified fans are likely to know the most, it would follow that fans would support it the most.
Importantly, the data actually support this explanation. As we mentioned above, the margin of support grows steadily across sports fans, MLB fans, and diehard fans. But look again at the “oppose” numbers among all four categories: 28 percent among U.S. adults, 31 percent among sports fans, 31 percent among MLB fans, and 28 percent among avid MLB fans. With a margin of error of 2 percent in the poll, these numbers aren’t statistically significantly different from one another, meaning that opposition was functionally stable across all four demographics.
What does this mean? It would seem to suggest that the uptick of support between U.S. adults (+11 percent in favor) and avid MLB fans (+34 percent in favor) came entirely from respondents moving from “don’t know/no opinion” to either “somewhat support” or “strongly support.” And if we want to get even more in the weeds, the “strongly support” percentage grew by 20 points, from 25% among U.S. adults to 45% among avid MLB fans, while the “somewhat support” percentage grew just three points, from 14% among U.S. adults to 17% among avid MLB fans. Avid MLB fans, who we can fairly assume are the most familiar with the details of MLB’s decision, were no more likely to oppose it, but they were much more likely to strongly support it.
Interestingly, the percentage of people who opposed MLB’s decision—which hovered around 30 percent across all levels of fandom—is just slightly below another significant data point from the past four years: Trump’s lowest-ever approval rating, which bottomed out at around 34 percent, depending on which poll you’re looking at. We don’t want to get too conspiratorial here, but the steady levels of opposition to MLB’s decision do seem jive with the conclusions that social scientists drew about Trump’s base during his four years in office, namely that there appears to be a baked-in percentage of Americans—between 30 and 35 percent—who will support the Trumpian position on a given issue no matter what. Given Trump’s public opposition to MLB’s decision, it makes perfect sense that about one out of every three respondents would also oppose it, regardless of whether they are baseball-agnostic or a die-hard fan.
Of course, you can’t draw too many grand conclusions from a single poll, especially since the collision of sports and partisan politics can generate some strange alliances and wonky outcomes. But there are, we think, some important lessons here. First, the data seem to suggest that the issues that the Republican Party has focused on of late, including MLB’s decision and the right’s broader crusade against “cancel culture,” are not particularly popular beyond its small base of support. Conversely, the data suggests that support for MLB’s decision depends in large part on how much people actually know about it: the more people know about this fairly simple issue, the more likely they are to support the (nominally) progressive option.
For MLB, this suggests a need to find new ways to plainly and straightforwardly articulate their position to non-fans. For Democrats in Congress hoping to pursue a progressive agenda, it suggests that, with the right outreach, they can actually win voters over to their side.
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