Are You Surprised?

Note: portions of this article came from Yahoo News.

You know how I feel about “polls.” If you want me to find that pretty much anything has “support” or “no support” I can show you a poll that does that. If you want to think Democrats are winning Wisconsin by 19 points, just call people who live in liberal Madison. If you want to hear the Republicans are winning call anywhere except Madison.

That being said I kind of like the YouGov polls that come out each day. My wife and her co-workers do them every day at lunch. They seem to capture a fairly broad range of opinions, and they categorize them by gender (there are only two, sorry not sorry) and political party.

Many of my friends have told me they are done with sports – particularly professional sports after all the social justice “stuff.” The fact that Lebron and other knuckleheads have taken the social justice banner and run with it seems to me like their ratings and popularity would be down. The kneeling, the fake outrage, the disrespect of the flag, silly boycotts, MLB pulling the all-star game out of Atlanta over a voting rights bill that actually expands voting but no Democrat has actually read the damn thing.

And the good news is this – according to YouGov, it is costing them ratings and dollars.

In the second half of 2020, nearly half of all Americans changed their sports viewing habits, according to a new YouGov / Yahoo News poll. As athletes and leagues embraced a new, progressive strategy aimed at amplifying messages of social justice and political advocacy, some Americans began watching more sports, but about three times as many watched less.

Of those who watch sports on TV, about 11 percent said they now watch more as a result of political and social messaging. However, 34.5 percent, more than one-third, said they are watching less. The majority, roughly 56.3 percent, said they watch about the same amount regardless of political or social messaging.

Ratings across all major sports were down in 2020, the result of a range of factors including time-shifted sports calendars and the presidential election, but it’s clear from this poll that politics and social justice had an impact on the ratings decline.

Men were more likely to turn away from sports as a result of social messages; 37.6 percent of males said they had tuned in less, as opposed to 28 percent of females. Meanwhile, 13 percent of men said they watched more sports in the wake of social justice movements, as opposed to only 7 percent of women.

The breakdown by political party runs as might be expected given the tenor of the national conversation around sports. About 13.7 percent of Democrats say they watched more sports in the wake of social justice movements, while 19 percent watched less. I found it interesting that even Democrats had watched less sports than more by a 2 to 1 margin. On the other hand, only about 8.6 percent of Republicans watched more sports, while 53 percent watched less once social justice messaging became prominent.

Worth noting is that Independents came in with only 8.7 percent saying they watched more sports in the social justice era, and about 38.6 percent said they watched less. A number that basically matches the Republican numbers cited above, and perhaps an indicator of how the 2022 mid term elections may go.

The survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,606 U.S. adults interviewed online between March 22-25, 2021. Respondents were asked, “How has the discussion of politics in sports on social media impacted your viewing habits,” and given the option to answer that they watched more sports, fewer sports, or the same, with a breakout option to state that they are not sports fans at all. The poll has a margin of error of ±2.7%.

One of my co-workers hit me up on Thursday to ask me if I was watching the Reds game. I’m happy to say that I honestly had no idea whatsoever that it was even opening day.