The 2008 election was the most diverse in modern history, with increases in participation among young people, minorities, unmarried individuals, and other historically underrepresented groups, according to a comprehensive new report by the voting rights group Project Vote. Whether gains by these groups will hold steady in 2010, however, remains to be seen.
This last diary in the 2008 Electorate series has bits and pieces that I didn't develop into full diaries, mainly maps from the exit polls. Below you'll find a bit about Democratic loyalty, education gaps in voting behavior, and where rural voters liked Democrats.
So, 90% of McCain's support came from whites, and 89% came from Christians, but the country is getting less white, and less Christian, and even whites and Christians are voting more and more for Democrats.
That sentence should set any Republican sweating. But here's the number that should send them crawling under the covers and whimpering: 66. 66% of those aged 18-29 voted for Obama last November. If only people this age had voted, Obama would have about 40 states and somewhere around 469 electoral votes, according to exit polls. Including Mississippi. And Arizona.
In one of the first diaries of this series, we noted that 90% of John McCain's votes came from white voters. More specifically though, 83% of John McCain's votes came from white Christian voters. As a proportion of the electorate, we saw whites are declining. But guess what? So are Christians, slowly but steadily. Here's how that looks:
What in the heck is wrong with Appalachia? I keep running into interesting correlations that tells me Appalachia should be giving far less support to Democrats at the presidential level than it actually does.
Here's the example from yesterday:
Click to enlarge.
If all of Central Appalachia behaved like the rest of the region, we'd expect to see all the points scattered near the line in the graph above. Instead, the points representing counties in parts of Appalachia go soaring off above 50%.
And Southern Appalachia does its own strange thing too. More below.
In this diary series, we've cycled through just about every ethnic group with available data. But there's one left: "Americans" - and the quotation marks are there for a reason.
In practice I am defining this group as whites who did not list an ancestry or listed American or United States as ancestry on the census form. Very few non-whites list American as an ancestry. There is also a correlation between the percent whites who list American ancestry and whites who do not list any ancestry, which is why I lumped them all together.
Who are these "Americans"? We can't tell, but there's lots of possible reasons to fall into this category: too many ancestries to list, unknown ancestry, patriotism, annoyance with labels, privacy concerns, getting bored filling out the census form, and sheer contrariness come to mind.
No matter, one thing is clear: nationwide, on average, the more whites describe themselves as "Americans" in a county, the less support for Obama among whites.
Take a look at the map below and see if you can figure out what the circled counties have in common:
Click to enlarge.
If you think these counties each had the best showing for McCain in their respective states, you're darn close, but not exactly right. Here's a hint: this diary is about the politics of European Americans - that is, those who identified a specific European ancestry in the 2000 census.
When Reagan was first elected, only one percent of voters (and six percent of the population) were Hispanic. Just five years previously, jurisdictions with Hispanic voters had been added to the list of areas covered by the Voting Rights Act.
In 2008, after a rapid increase in participation, the Latino proportion of the electorate had increased almost tenfold (in part because of immigration) to 9% (compared to 15% of the population). Here's a comparison of 2004 and 2008:
Click to enlarge.
The most striking feature of the map is the increase in the Latino electorate in the South and other areas outside the Southwest.
Alaska: Land Without Counties. You may have noticed every election results website (that I saw) showed you results by county for every state except Alaska. That's because their vote is tallied by State House district instead, and it takes a bit of effort to reorganize the data for different geographic units - of which the closest equivalent to counties are boroughs and census areas. Here's the map of the 2008 election results by State House district:
Click to enlarge.
Each district had somewhere between about 5000 and 12000 votes cast. Democratic strength is centered in Anchorage and Juneau, while Republican strength is in the South Central region (outside of Anchorage) and Fairbanks.
So what about the Native Alaskan vote, about 10% of the total voters?
Hawaii, of course, is a state. And there's 600,000 Pacific Islanders on the mainland, along with 3.4 million Puerto Ricans, 1.2 million Cubans, 0.8 million Dominicans, and 1.7 million from the West Indies. So there's actually a large number of Pacific Islanders and Caribbean Americans who, if citizens, can vote in the United States federal elections and do have representation.
But Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands are all United States Territories, and they do not have voting representatives in Washington DC, nor can they participate in the electoral college. (Additional US Territories have populations ranging from none to a handful.)
Here's a picture of Republicans shooting themselves in the foot:
Click to enlarge.
This shows the dramatic change in support from the Arabic-speaking community in Dearborn, Michigan. In 2000, Bush won with around 70%; in 2008, the community voted nearly 100% for Obama. I found no other community with change this stunning. This is what happens when you demonize a group of people: they stop voting for you. Quickly.
Of course, for those of you who read the previous diaries in this series, you know what I'm going to say next: we are not all of us alike. The Arab-American vote is not as monolithic nationwide as it is in Dearborn. We'll also explore communities with ties to other parts of Western and Central Asia below the fold.
The national exit polls showed nearly two-thirds of those identifying themselves as Asian voted for Obama, a strong majority. Let's use the census data to find some neighborhoods with heavy concentrations of Asian Americans and examine the election results.
Here's a promising place to start:
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This map shows percent Asian by precinct; there is a nice variation from none (yellow) up to about three-quarters (dark blue).
We should see a corresponding pattern in the precinct results then - here, dark blue shows strong support for Obama:
Click to enlarge.
Oops...
There's certainly a pattern there, but not what we might have expected from the nationwide exit polls.
It's easy to shift into shorthand when looking at demographic data and start talking about how Group A or Group B 'votes for Obama' or 'is Democratic.' Generally we all know that we really mean only that a majority of said population behaves that way, but the words still leave behind a bit of the impression that all people in Group A vote the same way. Especially if we hear in the media over and over and over and over and over that, for instance, white working class voters won't vote for Democrats anymore.
Perhaps the most justified statement of this sort is "African-Americans voted for Obama." When the exit polls say 95% did, indeed, vote for Obama, that seems to be pretty safe.
I'm going to start off even more extreme though - here's a map of election results from Chicago: there were a whopping 87 precincts where Obama had exactly 100% of the vote (shown in pink). They were generally located in African-American neighborhoods.
Click to enlarge.
Follow me below if you're wondering where I'm going with this.
(One year out from the 2010 elections, this is a continuation of a two-week series dreaminonempty is conducting on the demographics of the American electorate - promoted by Chris Bowers)
In 2008, 90% of John McCain's votes came from white voters. However, while the Republican relied primarily on white voters, only 55% of them voted for him.
Coincidentally, 55% is also the percent of babies born in the US in 2008 that were non-Hispanic white, according to Census estimates.
That just doesn't bode well for Republicans.
Here's how it looks:
Click to enlarge.
On the left, results from the 2008 exit polls. On the right, the decreasing share of the US population that is non-Hispanic white. Explanations below the fold.
(A really great look at the diverse roots of our progressive majority, and how it has been constituted by historical struggles over time. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
A (now long-ago) comment by fladem (pointing out that Obama won all the states that Lincoln won in 1860) led to this diary. What if the last election had taken place under the laws and customs that existed in most states in 1860? In other words, what if only white men could vote in 2008?
Now, that really is an alternate history question, so what we're seeing here on the left is how white men did vote in 2008, an election where everyone voted. On the right, how all those who gained voting rights after the Civil War voted - that is, non-whites and white women.
Click to enlarge.
The take home message: expanding voting rights - a progressive position - resulted in the ability to elect more liberal politicians. Below, more details and what this has to do with unions.
(In confluence with Chris's thesis about the growing demographic Democratic base, here's the latest from Project Vote. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The United States saw dramatic increases in voting from traditionally underrepresented groups, including minorities and young voters, according to a new analysis released this week by Project Vote. If borne out by systematic analysis of the voter rolls, this change in the electorate is evidence of the power of successful voter registration drives and an indication of the strong inclination of voters to participate in the process when candidates address their issues.
This has been a good election for map lovers. The New York Times has a great set of graphics that shows not only results but changes from the previous four elections.
I've put together a few cartograms and gone back to the 1988 election to see what changes we've had in the last 20 years.
Click to enlarge.
Not too much red there anymore, is there? The rest of the maps, and six conclusions to bicker about below.
We don't tend to pay much attention to state and local politics here at Open Left. When I post the occassional diary about something happening at the Port of Los Angeles, it doesn't usually draw more than a couple of comments--even though it involves trade, the environment and labor issues. And so it is that state-level races haven't gotten much attention here this cycle, either. But with 11 governors and 5,824 legislative seats up for grabs, I felt it wouldn't be too much to put up one overview diary--and give a chance for others who know more about specific states to add their wisdom in the comments. (This means YOU!) Coming off of 2006, Democrats control 55% of the seats, and we'll be electing roughly half of the state senators who will be involved in redistricting after the 2010 census. So this has obvious national significance.
Democrats control both chambers in 23 states compared to 14 for Republicans. In 12 states, party control is divided. Nebraska is unicameral and non-partisan.
In the last two weeks voter registration and early voting has shown that voters are geared up and ready to take part in what has been called a "historical event" on November 4.
Yesterday, I met Reagan Democrats waiting on line in Pittsburgh who are happily voting for Obama.
They're finally fed up, disgusted and know the whole thing was nothing more than a bunch of bullshit and one big con game on the American people.
Doors opened at 3PM at the Mellon Arena.
But before we got in, we waited on line. And what do you do on a long line? You talk to the people around you. I talked to two woman who had come from a Pittsburgh suburb about an hour away. They were unabashed Republican. One said, "they've (the Republican Party) destroyed us". Her Republican friend was a "straight up" healthcare voter.
Then they grabbed me by the arm and whispered, "we're Obama Republicans, don't believe what you read in the papers. So are lots of our neighbors, I'm positive there are thousands of us here."
The Mellon Center arena seats 16,958 for ice hockey, 17,132 at standing room capacity. It was PACKED!
