Little known fact (4.00 / 3)

Northern transplants are more Republican and more racists than native southerners. (Newt Gingrich, prime example.)

Another little known fact, low income whites have very low rates of voter turnout. They are unlikely to be union members and there is no white equivalent of the black voting rights groups (Richmond Crusade for voters, Norfolk's Goldenrod, etc.) that turn out poor whites. They do not vote.

When I lived in Richmond and I worked poor white precincts the Democratic vote increased dramatically. It is amazing how many votes you can win just  by asking for them. But you have to do it personally. Having the right message and putting it on TV has no effect of citizens who are convinced of their own powerlessness.

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by: AliceDem @ Sat Oct 13, 2007 at 23:05:37 PM UTC

Low Voting Rates, Yes, Racist Transplants, Not So Sure (0.00 / 0)

The low voting rates are well documented, and you are certainly right to point out that they are much easier to bring into the political process than is generally supposed--if the right approaches are used.

But the racial attitudes of transplants is a lot more comlicated. Using Newt Gingrich as an example of anything (other than megalomania) is a bit dicey.  Do Northern transplants all tend to marry their teachers, only to divorce them when they get cancer?

(For one thing, that certainly doesn't describe my brother, who moved to Kentucky from California back around 1980.)

There are a number of different factors at work, and they tend to work somewhat at cross-purposes, so nothing really will substitute for down and dirty empirical studies at relatively micro levels.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sat Oct 13, 2007 at 23:30:04 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

David Duke (0.00 / 0)

To lazy to find the documentation, but David Duke's old district includes a great many northern tranplants who work in Louisana's emerging tech industry.

I agree that Newt stand alone in horridness.

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by: AliceDem @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 00:24:45 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

But Then There's The Research Triangle (0.00 / 0)

It's not enough to cite individual examples, even individual examples of whole legislative districts.

It's certainly true that some folks are drawn to move South because they feel their racism will be more accepted there.  But other folks move for quite different reasons.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 00:39:59 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

A Southern Strategy Based Upon White Voter Reg? (0.00 / 0)

Certainly, the need to protect the black right to vote, especially access to the polls, is going to have to continue through the South.  And organizations that are designed to raise black levels of participation in politics and of voting are going to continue to need aid and support.

It would be interesting, as well, to see if there's some strategy of specifically reaching working class and poor whites.  My sense is that not all of this can be done with the same organizations that are successful in reaching blacks.  I'm not sure what works, but I'm interested in hearing both what's been tried, and what's been tried that worked.

I suspect also that in many states, we might add Latinos to this list as well.

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by: mbayrob @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 00:48:57 AM UTC

Local Dem committee (4.00 / 1)

My sense is that not all of this can be done with the same organizations that are successful in reaching blacks.

my sense that would not be  good approach. The best would be if local Dem committee incorporated this into the precinct operaitons.

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by: AliceDem @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 01:09:54 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Voter Registration (0.00 / 0)

The Jim Crow era barriers to black voting also served to disenfranchise some poor whites.  (Once again, I'm away from home, but I know I have books that cover this.)  One thing that needs to be done is make voter registration easier.

My proposal for full enfranchisement of the entire country is support a national ID card, but make it 100% government funded (so that it doesn't become a de facto poll tax), give an exemption so that only people born after a certain date are required to get one (to ease the burden on the elderly), and (this is the key) make issuance of a national ID card result in automatic registration to vote. 

Things like motor voter and internet voting are tilted toward urban and middle/upper class Americans.  I believe that politics is about trade-offs, and the trade I am proposing is giving conservatives the national ID that they desire due to concerns about national security and immigration if and only if they agree to making voter registration practically effortless for everyone. 

Some may have privacy concerns about this scheme, but I think that the overall trade-off, if implemented well, is a net positive for progressive causes by encouraging political participation from non-voters who would probably be more inclined to vote for Democrats because of economics.

Things You Don't Talk About in Polite Company: Religion, Politics, the Occasional Intersection of Both

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by: Anthony de Jesus @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 01:12:36 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

national ID card???? (4.00 / 1)

How would that help voting?

What we need is a concerted out reach, not just for voter registration, but voter turn out. The logical organization for this is the local Democratic committee and local precinct captains.

It really is as simple as going door to door. If you do that you will turn out your vote, if you fail to do so, you won't.

There is no subsitute for the local Democratic committee.

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by: AliceDem @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 13:11:47 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Internet voting? (0.00 / 0)

I don't think any jurisdiction has internet voting.

Motor/Voter does not just mean registration at the Div. of Motor Vehicles, it also means that you can take voter registration applications and distribute them. There is nothing preventing anyone from taking a carton of voter reg. applications and distributing them through poor neighborhoods. But hey, it is so much more comfortable to come up with grand national ID schemes than do actual grassroots work.

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by: AliceDem @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 13:16:39 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

See: "Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state" (4.00 / 1)

Hey Paul, for a political numbers guy, I can't believe you've missed the following research.

Andrew Gelman at the great blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science and others produced a 2005 paper looking at income and voting patterns by state and by county and state (among other models): Rich state, poor state, red state, blue state: What's the matter with Connecticut? (PDF).

Here is the first paragraph of the abstract:

We find that income matters more in "red America" than in "blue America." In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference. In addition to finding this pattern and studying its changes over time, we use the concepts of typicality and availability from cognitive psychology to explain how these patterns can be commonly misunderstood. Our results can be viewed either as a debunking of the journalistic image of rich "latte" Democrats and poor "Nascar" Republicans, or as support for the journalistic images of political and cultural differences between red and blue states- differences which are not explained by differences in individuals' incomes.

Here is the money quote, and then a comment on David Brooks:

Another way to understand these patterns is to compare counties within richer "blue" Democratic-leaning states and poorer "red" Republican-leaning states. In deep-red southern states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Mississippi, the richer counties support the Republicans and poorer counties support the Democrats. In contrast, consider the states nearest major national media: New York, Maryland, Virginia, and California. In these particular states, the richer counties showed a slight tendency to support the Democrats.

Thus, amusingly, the journalists noticed a pattern (richer counties supporting the Democrats) that is concentrated in the states where the journalists live. For example, Brooks (2001) compared a rich county in Maryland to a poor county in Pennsylvania. Had he compared counties within states such as Oklahoma, he would likely have noticed an opposite pattern.

So basically, they are saying the same thing as Paul. Income correlates with voting in the South, but not outside the South. This may not be the same thing as class.

A important general point from this article, is implicit in Paul's posts: The AGGREGATE correlation may show one thing, but if you disaggregate, the detailed structure becomes more interesting. Dem vs Rep might be 52/48 nationally, but withing specific subgroups, race, gender, income, region, you get much more uneven results. The big three R's in demographic research are Race, Region, Religion; subgroups combining these dimensions are even more interesting.

"Statistical Modeling" (the blog) has had a lof interesting articles in the past couple years. Worth adding to your weekly reading. They are Bayesian's, a statistical approach that was considered voodoo back when Paul and I were wee statistical tykes. (For the uninitiated, bayesian statistics gives you methods for folding known information back into your model. This was considered cheating or even worse, "un-rigorous", until the last decade or so.)

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by: MetaData @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 02:38:15 AM UTC

Thanks For The Link (0.00 / 0)

The PDF has been downloaded, and is eagerly trying to jump the queue.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 02:59:19 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Counterarguments (0.00 / 0)

Thanks for the post.

A counterargument I've read before is that Southern whites shifted to the Republicans because of the rise of the suburban South.  While this is related to white flight and racism, it is also related to hostility toward government, particularly taxes and welfare (which is again related to racism).

I honestly don't think it is possible to separate the suburban South, the rise of modern conservatism, and racism.  But it does seem that the economic conservatism of the GOP, especially with Reagan, and the allusions to racism (opposing welfare vs. the more blatant opposition to ending segregation) are keeping upper and middle income whites more loyal to the Republican Party--creating a suburban base of the GOP that fights against an urban and rural base for the Democrats.

The problem is that red state Democrats want to ignore social issues, or even run to the right, in order to win but blue state Democrats often win simply because of social issues.

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by: FreedomDemocrat @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 15:24:36 PM UTC

Confusing Cause And Effect (0.00 / 0)

It would hardly be surprising if Southern suburbs were more Republican than cities or rural areas, but that's confusing cause and effect.

Even without the suburbs, I just re-ran the numbers by decade, and there's a marked shift from the 1970s, when there was almost no income-related variation in Democratic Party ID in the non-suburban South, to the 1990s, when there was a 10% drop from those at or below the 33rd percentile and those above it.  The difference is even sharper this decade, but the sample size is pretty small.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 16:18:49 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Small Numbers (4.00 / 1)

That trend is interesting to note in the non-suburban South, but you're right, the size is pretty small.

You're going to find more upper and middle income whites in suburban ares of the South than in rural areas.  A lot of these suburban areas are a by-product of white flight.  So you have racially conservative whites who are also oriented towards the Republicans because of class.  Their voting behaviors are reinforced in two ways.

But when the Republicans pull out God, guns, and gays, they are doing so to appeal to lower income whites in rural areas.  Yes?

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by: FreedomDemocrat @ Sun Oct 14, 2007 at 16:56:05 PM UTC

[ Parent ]