Open Left - 2008 Election

Report Shows 2008 Electorate is Most Diverse in Modern History

project vote — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:36:27 GMT

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.
Representational Bias in the 2008 Electorate-written by Project Vote researchers Douglas R. Hess and Jody Herman-is an in-depth study that analyzes data from the 2008 general election, and compares them to registration and turnout rates from every presidential election this decade. Historically the U.S. electorate has been disproportionately skewed towards White, older, and more affluent Americans, and while the study shows this is still true, the increasing diversity of the American population was more accurately reflected at the polls in 2008.

"The good news of the 2008 election was the surge in young voters, particularly young minority voters," says Hess. "The only age group that demonstrated an overall increase in participation rate was voters under the age of 30, and that was largely driven by young Black, Latino, and Asian voters."

The voting rate of Black women under 30 increased by 7 percentage points compared to 2004, surpassing the voting rate of White women in that age group. The participation rate for Black men under 30 surged by nearly 11 points over 2004, and surpassed that of White men in that age group. Registration and turnout rates also increased among young Latinos and Asians of both genders.

The report, which analyses data from the U.S. Census Bureau, provides detailed information on registration and voting populations according to race/ethnicity, income, education, age, gender and marital status, residential mobility, and disability status. It also provides registration and turnout rates for each state with comparative rankings. Maine, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia are near the top of the list, with 78-79 percent of their eligible populations registered. New York, Arkansas, Tennessee, Utah, and Hawaii make up the bottom of the list, all with more than a third of their eligible residents still unregistered.

The surge in minority voting is an encouraging sign, says Project Vote executive director Michael Slater, and clearly had a powerful impact on the 2008 election. However, the report finds that significant disparities in participation still exist.

"Voter registration is the key," says Slater. "Roughly 90% of registered Americans from all demographics cast a ballot in 2008. However, nearly a third of all eligible Americans-over 60 million people-are unregistered, and they are disproportionately people of color, lower-income Americans, and citizens under the age of 30."

The report finds that the disparities, while smaller in 2008, still meant that millions of eligible Americans were left out of the process. If the underrepresented populations were registered and had voted at the rates of those in the overrepresented groups, tens of millions of more citizens would have cast a ballot in 2008, including over 5 million people of color, 8 million low-income Americans, and more than 7 million young people.

"It is clear that traditionally underrepresented groups will vote if given access to voter registration and candidates that speak to their issues," says report co-author Jody Herman. "But it is also clear that we need registration reforms that increase access to registration and promote participation among these groups."

This will be particularly important in the coming year, Slater cautions, as the 2010 mid-term elections may erase the gains made in 2008. "Mid-term elections always see a drop in participation, and if the 2009 Virginia election is any indication, the 2010 drop may once again hit these groups hardest. The youth vote dropped by half in Virginia from 2008 to 2009, the 60-and-over vote doubled, and turnout by people of color dropped significantly."

"It is important that government officials and civic organizations renew their commitment to helping underrepresented populations register and vote in 2010," says Slater.

2008 Electorate: A Few More Tidbits

dreaminonempty — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:55:15 GMT

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.
Democrats and Dixiecrats

It turns out there's still Dixiecrats hanging about in the South - not so many now, but they're there, concentrated in the Old South and extending parts of the Upland South as well:

Click to enlarge. See note about color.

Meanwhile, party loyalty generally increased among Democrats in the West, Upper Midwest, Northeast, and New South:

Click to enlarge.

Town and Country

The story of the urban/rural divide this year was actually the suburbs, where Obama basically tied McCain. Rural voters are not as skewed as is typically thought, voting Democratic in the Northeast and parts of the Midwest and West.

Click to enlarge.

Town and Gown

In education, we saw the Republicans lose the most educated vote as they became the party of ignorance, anti-science, and Sarah Palin. Although there is the glaring exception of the rice belt.

Click to enlarge.

________________________________________________
This diary is the last in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change. One final diary summarizing the series may be forthcoming next week.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History
Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared - Race
African-Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike
East and South Asian Americans - Diverse and Growing
West Asian Americans - Rapid Change
Native Americans - Increasing Participation
Islander Americans - In Need of More Representation
Alaskan Natives - An Economic Factor?
Latino Americans - Increasing Influence
European Americans - Tribal Politics Persist
"American" Americans - You Might Be Surprised
White Evangelicals - Influence Beyond Their Numbers
Appalachia - Surprisingly Democratic
Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Scared - Religion
Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Really Scared - Age

Cross posted at DailyKos.

Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Really Scared

dreaminonempty — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.

Here's the chart, and the map:

Click to enlarge.
More than Demographic Change

The first thing we might think is that young people voted more Democratic because they are less white and less Christian than any previous generation, something we've touched on before in this series.

But while that is true, young people within almost every demographic also voted more Democratic than their elders in 2008:

Click to enlarge.

There are two exceptions - African Americans, where the trend is essentially flat, and Jewish voters, where youngsters are slightly more likely to vote Republican (similar to what was seen in 2004). Even White Evangelicals have more Democratic youngsters.

Geography and the Age Gap

The difference between the youngest and oldest generations is greatest where the demographic difference between the generations is greatest:

Click to enlarge.

Data for whites alone show less of a geographic trend, although the numbers are more squirrely because of smaller sample sizes:

Click to enlarge.

But They'll Grow More Conservative...

Maybe. But in last forty years or so, that hasn't been the case, according to an analysis of the changes in attitudes towards minorities and privacy issues over a thirty year time period. Indeed, we can directly observe this politically by looking at exit polls over the same time period.

We start with 1972: Nixon won all age brackets, but McGovern pulled in 46% of those aged 18-29, compared with 31-33% for all other age groups. In 2008, this same cohort, now 54-65, voted approximately 50% for Obama. Obviously, those young idealist hippies abandoned their utopian nonsense as they aged, paid taxes, and raised families. Oh wait... they didn't, did they?

Below is the graph for the political behavior of three age cohorts from the 1972 election: 18-29, 30-44, and 45-59. Note that for later elections, age ranges do not perfectly match: for instance, the data for those aged 50-64 in 2008 is used to represent the cohort that was 18-29 in 1972, even though their actual ages ranged from 54-65 in 2008. Older data can be found in the New York Times.

Click to enlarge.

What we see is that people from all age groups have tended to vote more Democratic as the years go by - and the biggest changes have come among the older voters. Those older than 30 in 1972 supported Reagan in 1984 far less than they supported Nixon in 1972. And they supported Bush and McCain even less than that.

Part of this can be attributed to immigration, but only a small part. Looking at the immigration numbers, if we assume that naturalized citizens vote at the same rate as everybody else and all of them vote for Democrats (which is not true), then the 18-29 cohort from 1972 should have become 2 points more Democratic by 2008.

But what about the Reagan generation? Youth from the 1980s have also grown a little more Democratic:

Click to enlarge.

But here's another but: the 2008 election is different, coming on the heels of a disastrous administration that sent people scurrying away from toxic Republican label. Maybe it's more like the 1976 election, and we all know what happened in 1980. Here's what happened to two 1976 cohorts:

Click to enlarge.

Although they swung towards conservatives, by this decade they were pretty close to where they started.

So over the past few decades, different age cohorts have generally become more Democratic, or stayed about the same at the presidential level. That doesn't mean the same thing will happen over the next thirty years, but it does mean that it's simply not true that people become more conservative as they age.

________________________________________________
This diary is the sixteenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History
Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared
African-Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike
East and South Asian Americans - Diverse and Growing
West Asian Americans - Rapid Change
Native Americans - Increasing Participation
Islander Americans - In Need of More Representation
Alaskan Natives - An Economic Factor?
Latino Americans - Increasing Influence
European Americans - Tribal Politics Persist
"American" Americans - You Might Be Surprised
White Evangelicals - Influence Beyond Their Numbers
Appalachia - Surprisingly Democratic
Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Scared

Monday: Last of the Series - Extra Bits and Pieces

Cross posted at DailyKos.

Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really Scared

dreaminonempty — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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:

Click to enlarge.
Double Trouble, Again

Once again, it's not just that the primary Republican demographic is declining, that demographic is also voting increasingly for Democrats:

Click to enlarge.

Both Christians and non-Christians have been trending towards Democrats over the past 30 years. The trend among Christians can not be completely accounted for by the increasing number of non-white Christians, either, as slight (but not significant) trends can be seen among white Protestants and white Catholics as well:

Click to enlarge.

Basically, McCain barely won Christians in 2008, and non-Christians are solidly Democratic. Meanwhile, all the trends are against Republicans.

Changes in Identification

The Pew survey on religion has a wealth of data regarding changes in religious identification, and Gallup has long-term trends. Looking at people who join and leave certain religions over their lifetime, they found the fastest growing identification was Agnostic, followed by Other (New Age, Unitarian, Native American), Atheist, Nothing in Particular, Buddhist, and Muslim. Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant groups showed net losses.

Despite losing almost a quarter of their ranks to other denominations, Catholics are maintaining their proportion in the electorate because of immigration, mainly from Latin America. This is not, however, particularly soothing to Republicans. Overall, recent immigrants are about the same proportion Unaffiliated (Atheist, Agnostic, and Nothing in Particular) as the country as a whole, but about twice as likely to belong to a non-Christian religion (8-10% instead of 5%). They are also far more Catholic - almost 50% Catholic, and only about a quarter Protestant; currently the nationwide figures are about 50% Protestant and a quarter Catholic.

The Numbers

Looking at the bar chart in the introduction, white Mainline Protestants and Catholics (two diverse groups themselves, mind you) were essentially split 50-50, white Evangelical Protestants were strongly Republican, and non-white Christians were strongly Democratic. All together, Christians were split close to evenly, with a slight advantage for McCain. However, every category of non-Christian voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Here's another way to look at the data from Pew, combined with other polls, with more divisions:

Click to enlarge.

There's really only three bright spots for Republicans: Mormons, White Evangelical Christians, and Orthodox Jews.

More Trends

We have data for a few more religious groups as well:

Click to enlarge.

Mormons may show a weak trend over the years towards Republicans. The data shown are for Rich County, Utah, which was 85% Mormon in 2004 (95% in 1989), according to LDS church records (which may overstate the number). Sadly for Republicans, Mormons make up only about 2% of the country. Even in Utah, projections are that less than half the population will be Mormon by 2030. Not only that, but the increasingly obvious antipathy of the Republican base towards Mormons in general and Mitt Romney in particular might throw some cold water on this trend. Especially in light of the appointment of popular Utah governor (and Mormon) Jon Huntsman as ambassador to China.

The Jewish vote has not only long been a solid Democratic demographic, but has been an increasingly Democratic demographic, despite quadrennial stories on Republicans making gains with Jewish voters. In 2008 Obama had the highest support of any Democratic candidate since the measurements began, at 83%, besting even the Gore/Lieberman ticket. (Note that because of small samples, this is not significantly stronger support than prior years.) This in a year of Barack the Scary Muslim emails targeting Jewish voters in particular, which were clearly ineffective. Once again, however, we see an example of We Are Not All of Us Alike, as Orthodox Jews showed strong support for McCain this year and Bush in 2004. (Note that poll results shown in the chart above among Jewish subcategories are based on results from a July poll that have been adjusted to fit the final exit poll results.) Estimates seen earlier for several Jewish immigrant communities in New York and Americans in Israel also showed strong support for McCain.

The Muslim community showed very strong support for Democrats this year, and among Arab Muslims at least, a dramatic increasingly Democratic trend. The poll of Muslim voters was completed by randomly selecting names from a list of Muslim voters, so there could be a bias to it depending on how the list was generated. However, the results are in agreement with the Muslim subsample in the poll of Arab Americans, and the Bangladeshi and Pakistani subsamples in the Asian American poll. Another demographic slice of the Muslim American community, African Americans, is also strongly Democratic. The recent development of Muslim American political behavior has been described as occurring in three stages: first, debating whether to participate in elections at all prior to 2000; second, whether to increase political power by voting as a block prior to 2004; and third, a less organized but perhaps more involved participation prior to the 2008 elections. It has been a dramatic ten years, from the seeming betrayal by George Bush, who had strong Muslim support in 2000, to the 2008 campaigns where the Muslim label was used as a rhetorical bludgeon (a ploy which may have backfired), to the election of a man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and has family ties to Islam.

White Evangelical Christians show a short-term trend that parallels Rich County, Utah, but there's really not enough data to make much of it. More on this group can be found here.

Finally, a brief mention of Baha'i and Zoroastrianism: very small samples in the poll of Iranian-Americans in California indicated Iranian-American members of these faiths have views aligned with the more conservative of Iranian-Americans, and would therefore likely have more or less split their presidential vote. Clearly, the uncertainty here is very large.

________________________________________________
This diary is the fifteenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Really Scared - Age
Sunday: Last of the Series - Extra Bits and Pieces

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: Appalachia - Surprisingly Democratic

dreaminonempty — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.
Ten Second Summary
Appalachia has been moving away from Democrats over the last 30 years, although faster rates of decline in Democratic support (in relative terms) can be found among non-Appalachian Southern whites. Still, Appalachia is far more supportive of Democrats in places than one might have expected based on several variables. Religion and history both likely play a role.

Back to Mississippi

Back in one of the first chapters of this series, I showed a plot of percent Obama versus percent white in Southern and Central Mississippi. There's a reason for that: counties in Northern Mississippi just don't fall on that line. They're a good deal more supportive of Obama than we might have expected given their racial composition. (Note that only counties where 97% or more of the population in 2000 was either African-American or white are included in the regression.)

Click to enlarge.

The same is true for Alabama. When you look at which counties don't fit on the line (shown in green below), it's a familiar pattern:

Click to enlarge.

The counties where Obama did better than expected based on the percent of the population that's white are almost all in Southern Appalachia. There's a few more along the Gulf Coast, too. Also note that the one red county is red not because whites there are far more Republican, but because it is 14% Native American, and thus an analysis based on a binary black/white universe does not work with that county.

Change, Change, Change

The pattern was even more striking in the past. Here's the graphs for the 2008, 2004 and 1988 elections:

Click to enlarge.

You can see Southern Appalachia used to be even more Democratic, given its racial composition, than the rest of Alabama and Mississippi. White support for Democrats has decreased in all parts of these states. Outside of Appalachia, support among whites in Mississippi and Alabama fell around 15-25% between 2004 and 2008 - a mere trifle compared to the 65-75% decrease between 1988 and 2008. In Southern Appalachia, support fell as well, but not as much - about 10-20% from 2004 to 2008, and 40-60% from 1988 to 2008.

Central Appalachia

In Central Appalachia we see a similar pattern. Although, as I showed in the introduction, we see far more support in parts of this region than we would have expected, this is after a substantial decline in support compared to support for Kerry. Indeed, many counties in this region showed some of the largest decreases in Democratic support at the presidential level from 2004 to 2008, both in absolute numbers and percentages.

A major difference shows up when you look at vote totals, however. In Appalachian Mississippi and Alabama, vote totals are generally a little higher in 2008 than in 2004.

In many of the counties with the greatest drop in Democratic support in Appalachian Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, however, vote totals dropped a lot. For example, (and this is one of the most extreme examples) in Harlan County, Bush had 6659 votes to Kerry's 4332 votes. In 2008, McCain had 7165 votes (506 more than Bush) but Obama only had 2586 votes (1746 fewer compared to Kerry, a 40% drop). Harlan County is not one of the Central Appalachian counties that gives more support to Democrats than we expect. But the same pattern shows up in those counties as well - for example, Floyd County, Kentucky. This suggest that many Democrats in Central Appalachia didn't vote for McCain last year - they simply didn't vote.

Why?

We now have several questions to answer:

Why did Obama do so much worse than Kerry among many Appalachian whites?

Why do Democrats do so much better in Appalachia than we might otherwise expect?

Why are some Central Appalachians so different, politically, from their neighbors?

Why did Obama do worse than Kerry in so much of Appalachia?

First, let's assume that many Kerry voters stayed home in 2008 in Central Appalachia. Mathematically, it could be that many Bush voters stayed home and many Kerry voters voted for McCain, but that doesn't make as much sense to me. In Southern Appalachia, on the other hand, it was more of a switch to the Republican, as turnout did not decrease as much.

So why stay home or switch? Possibilities include: not a strong Obama campaign presence, and rumors Obama would eliminate the coal industry (a reason specific to coal-producing areas). Or maybe it's because he's African-American.

I can't claim to know what's in any voter's mind. However, I believe there's evidence that Obama's low support in this region was not because he's African-American. At least, not in Tennessee. Why? Because Harold Ford, in a Senate election in which race played a role, did better than John Kerry in every county in the state, including in Appalachian Tennessee. In fact, he essentially did just as well as Al Gore throughout the whole state, once home-county favorites are accounted for.

So in Tennessee at least, it's not that people wouldn't vote for an African-American, because they have in the past. Harold Ford did just as well as Al Gore, who did better than John Kerry, who did better than Barack Obama. So how else was Obama different from Kerry? Another possibility is the labeling of Obama as the ultimate "Other". Forget race - he's a Socialist Secret Muslim Foreign Anti-American Terrorist, born in ~~Hawaii~~ Kenya and raised in Indonesia!!!! As cskendrick put it (more reasonably) in a diary well worth the read:

A urbane, well-educated, well-off, well-spoken, forward-looking son of a recent immigrant who did not share the country-boy-can-survive ethos would have been a tough sell in the most affable of Appalachian moods.

The final potential reason I will bring up is simply a continuation of prior trends. Essentially, whites in Appalachia have a strong Democratic tradition that has been on a slow decline over the last thirty years that is accelerated in areas with a strong Baptist presence (not necessarily caused by Baptism itself). In Southern Appalachia, the Republicans' racist Southern Strategy has also played a role. The 2008 election is simply consistent with prior trends, and the splotch of purple showing decreased Democratic performance is not necessarily due to anything specific about Obama. Let's look at the voting records of selected nearly all-white counties to see how this plays out:

Click to enlarge.

On the left, we see two counties in Central Appalachia with very few Baptists and the state of West Virginia essentially following the country in voting preferences until about 1980. After 1980, the country gradually swings towards Democrats, while Central Appalachia slowly slides the other way, although still maintaining relatively strong support for Democrats. In the middle, we see a different pattern post-1980 in counties with large numbers of Southern Baptists: a surge of support for Clinton, followed by a precipitous drop as the faith-based Republican Permanent Majority get out the vote program is put in place. On the right, we see the effect of Civil Rights and the Reagan Revolution. In the Roosevelt era, white Southerners were strongly Democratic; after a wild ride of third party candidates and Nixon mania, Carter pulled the old Democratic coalition together one last time before the plunge. After 1980, we see a Baptist and Appalachian pattern in the two counties shown, according to their characters.

Why is Appalachia unusually Democratic?

Part of the answer to this question lies in perspective and the way I've set up the narrative of this diary. When we're looking at Alabama and Mississippi, whites in Appalachia are far more Democratic at the presidential level than whites in the rest of these two states. Comparing Appalachian Pennsylvania to the rest of that state shows a different story. What we're really seeing is a geographic/political/cultural boundary that follows the physical geography - the Appalachians on their Eastern and Southern side - instead of the political geography - state lines. (On the other side of the Appalachians, the boundary of political behavior is more diffuse, as we saw in the previous diary, and indeed extends to some degree well past the Appalachians, through the Upland South and Ozarks).

The real question then becomes, Why is Appalachia behaving as a political unit? That is a more complicated question to answer, rooted in history, class, and economics, and I would refer you again to cskendrick, and also Genius at Wrok.

Why are there large differences among "American" Central Appalachians?

In the previous diary, and in the Introduction, we saw some very large discrepancies in the voting behavior of those who label their ancestry as "American" or who do not chose a label. In some parts of Central Appalachia, this group more or less evenly split their vote; in other parts, it was a landslide in favor of McCain.

In Western Kentucky, for instance, the Northern half was fairly supportive of Obama; the Southern half had low support. There's no clear difference in variables such as race, education, and income. But one variable does stand out: religion, as shown above. Take a look at the table comparing two Appalachian counties in Kentucky:

Click to enlarge.

There's two major differences - population density and religion. The county that is more rural gave much more support to Obama. The county that is more Baptist gave much more support to McCain. This pattern holds throughout Appalachian Kentucky: maps show the patterns of religious membership and population density have a rough relationship to the pattern of places with relatively high Democratic support. And the churches we're talking about are predominantly Baptist.

Note that those not claimed by a religious body are not necessarily non-believers; rather, their denomination may not have been surveyed, or they may be religious without attending formal services. For instance, home-based bible study groups.

What we see here may be the effect of the institute of Baptist religion on politics. There could be something else at play as well: Why do we see the particular pattern of Baptist adherence in the maps above? Is it related to the geography and population density? There could easily be some underlying factor not captured by the numbers above the results in resistance to the Baptist faith, lower population density, and support for Democrats.

However, on the statewide level, there is a strong relationship between the percent of whites who voted for Obama and the percent who call themselves evangelical or born-again. This relationship is described in a diary that is essentially the next part of this series, although it was published last year.

For more on religion, we'll wait until tomorrow.

________________________________________________
This diary is the thirteenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Next in Series (Previously Published): White Evangelicals - Influence Beyond Their Numbers

Tomorrow: Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really Scared - Religion

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: "Americans" - You Might Be Surprised

dreaminonempty — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.

Click to enlarge.
Ten Second Summary

Those who identify as "American" generally did not support Obama very strongly, and typically less so than other whites in their region; this is true to varying degrees in different parts of the country. There are two exceptions. First, the Northeast, where "Americans" supported Obama. Second, Appalachia, where support was split, and greater than support from other whites.

Support Among Whites

This analysis relies on location-specific estimates of Obama's support among non-white racial categories to estimate Obama's support among whites in each county. This estimate gets shaky when the percent white is below around 75%, and pretty lousy below 50%. The map below shows all the results - negative values (I told you the estimate can get shaky!) are plotted as zero. Counties less than 50% white will not be considered further for this analysis.

Click to enlarge.

Examples

When we plot percent support for Obama among whites against percent of whites who are "American" in individual states, most states show graphs that are rather dull, partly because many states have a small range of variation in the percent "American." Here's an exception - the state with the best regression, Florida:

Click to enlarge.

Florida shows a very wide range in values on the x-axis that could be attributed to a rural/urban, born-and-raised/retiree cultural split.

Regional Differences
First, where are these "Americans" located?

Click to enlarge.

There's not a uniform distribution, nor is their uniform behavior, as one might expect from such a catch-all category.

In fact, we can loosely group states and regions according to where on the original plot their data fall, although some areas could easily fall into several categories. When we do this, we find remarkable differences across the country, although the regressions are a little rough. Here are the results of these groupings, just showing the regressions:

Click to enlarge.

You may notice something very strange: only one line is going steeply up. In Central Appalachia, support for Obama increases as the population becomes more "American." Elsewhere it decreases or is flat (the Northeast). Yes, folks, this part of Appalachia is, indeed, different from the rest of the country - because they were far more supportive of Obama than we might have expected based on this variable. The Northeast also stands out, in that support for Obama among whites is essentially independent of percent "American" - and high.

We can use these graphs to generate support levels for different groups of "Americans" based on their (rather poorly-defined) region. These regions are not the same as what is plotted above, but related. For example, both Old South and New South have at one endpoint of their regression very high levels of white 'Americans' with very low support for Obama, dubbed here Confederacy 'Americans'. The difference between Old South and New South is at the other end of the regression; Old South has low support among whites who identify an ancestry, but New South has high support among those who identify an ancestry.

Click to enlarge.

Defining the Regions

Let's take a closer look at the regions. Each map below shows how well one of the lines above can predict Obama's performance. We're looking for yellow. If counties on the Yankee map are yellow, it means they sit pretty close to the Yankee regression line. Green means a pretty poor prediction, and blue means lousy. The numbers refer to the residual - the difference between what the lines predict, and what the election results were.

Click to enlarge.

Starting in the Northeast, many counties from Maryland on up to Maine sit on the line. There's a concentration of counties in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, however. If we look at New England - essentially a more pro-Obama subset of Yankee - we see, well, New England. An area more or less on the West of the Connecticut River (Vermont and Western Massachusetts) is mostly green/blue - this area is even more pro-Obama.

Click to enlarge.

Moving South and West, the Heartland region has some pretty sharp boundaries on the West. There's low support for Obama among "Americans" here, but not abysmally low. We see some old friends show up as blue spots here and there - the counties with high concentrations of those with Dutch ancestry, for instance. Note especially how state borders are not always followed. The border states on the Southern side are mostly green - meaning they don't fit all that well on the Heartland line.

Click to enlarge.

So we move on South to Real America. This regression describes mainly areas of Appalachia and the Upland South on over to the Ozarks (and parts of Florida?). Support for Obama among "Americans" here was higher than in the Heartland. But we see some blue patches in Central Appalachia...

Click to enlarge.

In Central Appalachia, support for Obama was split among "Americans," and far higher than everywhere else except the Northeast. The map shows the counties that are described well by this regression stretching from Pennsylvania down into Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky, and some in Tennessee as well. There's a good deal of yellow in the region where two regressions meet, and a county could be predicted by either the Central Appalachia line or the Real American line. What is unique about Central Appalachia is the central region (in Central Appalachia) of high percent "American" and about 50% support for Obama.

Click to enlarge.

Finally we come to the Confederacy and Old West. Looking at the maps, there's no clear demarcation, and not much difference, just a fade from one to another around the Southern Plains. There's actually a little lower support among "Americans" in the Old West. We can gain a few more insights from the Old West map, however. First, there appears to be another region - the Pacific Coast, essentially the Northern California coast and Oregon and Washington west of the Cascades - where support among "Americans" is about 10 percentage points higher than the rest of the Old West. Then we have the Mormon Corridor, where support is lower. And finally, the New West - blue spots here and there, including many cities.

All these maps put together - and they more or less look like this. (For more maps of cultural regions, go here.) In other words, politics among "Americans" more or less follows previously described cultural boundaries in the United States.

________________________________________________
This diary is the twelfth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: The Appalachian Electorate: Surprisingly Democratic

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: European Americans - Tribal Politics Persist

dreaminonempty — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.

Answer on the flip.
Ten Second Summary

Those who identify their ancestry as European are a diverse group, too. Even after generations, ethnic identity is related to politics in ethnic enclaves at least.

The Answer

Each county circled above has the highest percentage of those with Dutch ancestry (first listed ancestry) in its state. Here's a map of Dutch ancestry to compare to the electoral results:

Click to enlarge.

Turns out this is a pretty heavily Republican demographic - about 10-20% support for Obama. This leaves heavily Dutch counties in the Midwest looking a fair bit redder than their neighbors. And it's not because there's large differences in other demographic variables, such as race, income, or education.

These communities have maintained the culture of the original immigrants to at least some extent as Dutch ethnic enclaves. In 1847, two conservative Reformed pastors founded Holland, Michigan and Pella, Iowa. The percent of residents who are Reformed adherents (map) is pretty close to the percent who describe their ancestry as Dutch, indicating a substantial amount of cultural continuity. Holland, Michigan, for example, appears to take great pride in its Dutch heritage.

Not all people who indicate a European ancestry in the census may be as affected (politically) by their cultural heritage as those in these Dutch communities. There's bound to be a spectrum, from those who have a profound identification with the culture, language, religion, and values of their ancestors to those who only dimly recall their ancestors' origins.

European Americans - The Results

Here's the voting preferences of various groups of European ancestry, estimated from the November election results and census data:

Click to enlarge.

Broadly speaking, there's some tribal divisions to be seen here: Nordic descendants were more likely to support Obama, while other Germanic descendants were more likely to support McCain. Slavic descendants and immigrants also were likely to support Obama.

We Are Not All of Us Alike. Yet Again.

Of course, just as with other (typically more recent) immigrant groups, we would not expect all communities with origins in one country to have similar political tendencies. I would suspect recent immigrants from the Netherlands, for instance, would be more likely to vote for Obama than McCain, given that the Netherlands was the most pro-Obama European country (6th in the world), with 74% preferring Obama and 10% preferring McCain in a Gallup poll.

We see this above for those of Swedish heritage. In Minnesota, I estimate strong support for Obama among those of Swedish heritage; in Wisconsin, somewhat less, although it's hard to tell; but in Kansas, support is low, and similar to other Kansans. We can also see this to a lesser extent for those of German heritage, where support for Obama is higher in Wisconsin than in other states. And, we can see a role for religion, with those in Utah of English origin - which in that state is correlated to the percent of adherents to the Mormon religion - less likely to support Obama than those of English ancestry in New England. Perhaps the biggest differences are seen between those in the Northeast with French ancestry, and those in Louisiana with Cajun or French ancestry. In this case, the differing historical journeys of these two populations is quite clear, despite the common French thread.

We can also see strong differences between ethnic groups within a state - in North Dakota and Minnesota, for instance, there's a large difference in support between those of German and Norwegian ancestry that shows up in the election results map:

Click to enlarge.

Sometimes We Are Alike. Coincidence?

One intriguing finding is that seven different Polish-American communities (Sherman County, NE and Morrison and Lincoln County, MN not shown) all showed similar (and strong) support for Obama. Here's a few more details on four of these communities; census data from 2000:

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY: Population 37,000. Urban working class community; Polish immigration from the 1890s to present day. 17,000 list first ancestry as Polish; 15,000 speak Polish (2000 under age 18) and 14,000 were born in Poland.

Cook County, IL: Population 5,000,000. The largest Polish community in the nation, urban and suburban, continuing immigration. 425,000 list first ancestry as Polish; 160,000 speak Polish (23,000 under age 18) and 121,000 were born in Poland. The census tracts used to estimate support for Obama were suburban, and around half to two-thirds of those with Polish ancestry were born in Poland.

Portage County, WI: Population 67,000. Rural communities, settled partly by Polish farmers starting in the 1850s. About 19,000 list first ancestry as Polish; 1,000 speak Polish (40 under age 18) and only 80 were born in Poland.

Luzerne County, PA: Population 303,000. An old industrial and mining center with a strong union history. The only county where a plurality of residents has Polish ancestry; immigration began 150 years ago. 60,000 list first ancestry as Polish; 2700 speak Polish (200 under age 18) and 400 were born in Poland.

Urban, suburban, and rural; recent immigrants, or longstanding American families; agricultural or industrial: were these communities all strongly supportive of Obama for different reasons or because of cultural similarities?

Ethnic Whites

I heard a lot about the Ethnic White vote during the 2008 election. A brief search does not yield a clear definition, but a look at immigration patterns might help:

Click to enlarge.

Until the late 19th century, voluntary immigration to this country was almost entirely from Germanic Northern European countries, with the major exception of Ireland. Then there was a large influx from Southern and Eastern Europe, and plenty of social strife to go with it. In 1924, immigration quotas shut down immigration from these areas (and others).

So let's tentatively define "Ethnic White" as Eastern and Southern European, plus Irish (Catholic). This is essentially the upper half of the chart shown in the Results section above.

One thing stands out immediately: ethnic whites are not a monolithic group at all. Nationwide, as a group, it's quite likely that they tilt towards Republicans a bit, although remember that estimates from one geographic area aren't necessarily representative of a nationwide sample. However, there is a large amount of variation, from a generally strong support for Obama among Polish Americans to very low support among Italian Americans in portions of New York City and New Jersey.

Warning

These results are all from areas with high concentrations of people identifying with a particular ancestry - ethnic enclaves. Just as with other groups we've seen, it would be reasonable to assume those identifying with a European ancestry probably vote in a more uniform manner living within an ethnic enclave than outside of one.

________________________________________________
This diary is the eleventh in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: The 'American' American Electorate: You Might Be Surprised

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008: Latino Electorate - Increasing Influence

dreaminonempty — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.
Ten Second Summary

The Latino electorate is growing around the country, not just in the Southwest. Again, we see that we are not all alike, and more demographically uniform communities are more uniform in voting behavior as well.

The Usual Suspects
In 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ending the war with Mexico provided for Mexican citizens living in territory ceded to the United States to become US citizens and vote. Most did indeed become citizens, and various states wasted no time in denying them the right to vote.

In 2008, seven states had more than 10% of the exit poll respondents describe themselves as Latino. Among them, there was essentially no change between 2004 and 2008 in Texas and Florida, and a slight decrease in California. The rest of the Southwest showed dramatic increases: from 8% of the electorate in 2003 to 13% of the electorate in 2008 (+63%) in Colorado, 10% to 15% in Nevada (+50%), 32% to 41% in New Mexico (+28%), and 12% to 16% in Arizona (+33%). The states without much change had the same status in 2004 and 2008 - uncompetitive for TX and CA, battleground for FL. The states with large increases, however, became fierce battlegrounds on the presidential level in 2008 - except for Arizona, which had some attention at the last minute - implying that campaigning and organizing likely played a large role in increasing the Latino electorate in this region.

The New South

A sixty percent increase in the share of the electorate that is Latino as we see in Colorado is damn impressive.

But how about a more than 400% increase? That's what we saw in Mississippi, which went from less than 1% Latino in 2004 to 4% in 2008.

Now, since we're looking at such small numbers, maybe we just see a statistical burp in Mississippi. Let's look elsewhere - we see a 300% increase in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana, and Alabama. A 250% increase in Maryland. A 200% increase in South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. A 100% increase in Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, North Dakota, Alaska, and New Hampshire.

These are all states that had a 0-3% Latino share of the electorate in 2004 and 2-7% in 2008. While that's small, it's enough now to be critical in close elections - such as the North Carolina race for president.

The interesting bit is that most of these states with dramatic growth have a geographic sweep, from the Deep South up to the Northern Plains (skipping the Southern Plains and most of the Midwest). Latino voters are clearly one important component of the New South.

Confirmation

All these single digit numbers still make me a bit twitchy, so I pulled up some 2000 Census data to look for some confirmation. It turns out there is a relationship between states with a rapidly increasing Latino share of the electorate and states with a high Latino growth rate, especially those with a high proportion of Latinos who say they moved to that state within five years preceding the census. It's a rough relationship, as we would expect when dealing with small numbers, but it looks real. We can conclude that the Latino vote is indeed increasing rapidly in large portions of the country.

The Votes

Here's how various Latino and Hispanic communities voted at the presidential level in 2008. Brazilian, which would not typically be considered Latino, and Guyanese are included simply because of geography.

Click to enlarge.

Support for Obama ranged from high to overwhelmingly high - except for the Cuban community in Miami-Dade county. This year, a nationwide Latino exit poll (conducted by email) by the William C. Velásquez Institute (WCVI) showed nearly the same results as the National Election Pool exit poll - about 70% for Obama. (In 2004, the National Election Pool had some problems, such as oversampling the Cuban community.)

If we weight each Latino community by its proportion in the Latino electorate, we would come up with about 85% for Obama nationwide. This means the communities used to derive support levels for Obama were more Democratic than the nationwide Latino electorate. We see good evidence for this in the Mexican-American community. In Starr County and select precincts in Los Angeles, more than 95% of the population is Latino, and almost all of them are Mexican-American. Support for Obama in these two locations ran about 10 points higher than support among Mexican-Americans nationwide in the WCVI poll.

We can also see, as with African-Americans, that approval of President Bush in 2005-2006 was greater among Latinos who lived in states where Latinos made up a small proportion of the population, although the trend is much weaker than among African-Americans. Once again, it appears that people tend to vote more uniformly in more ethnically uniform geographies.

Click to enlarge.

Note on names: current exit polls use the term "Latino," so that is what I am using for current data, simply because the data under discussion results from those willing to check a box that says "Latino." As far as I know this is not a term with universal approval from those to which it is applied.

________________________________________________
This diary is the tenth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: The European American Electorate: Tribal Politics Persist

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: Native Alaskans - An Economic Factor?

dreaminonempty — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:42:02 GMT

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?

Precinct Level Map

Zooming in one geographic level, the map below shows 2008 presidential results by precinct - but it only shows precincts that were more than 85% Alaskan Native or Native American in the 2000 census.

Click to enlarge.

At first glance, this a patchwork crazy quilt. Part of this is because almost half the precincts had fewer than 100 votes, and when you have so few votes, things get squirrely. But there are some geographic patterns there if you squint.

Compare to the map of native languages, or the related map of Regional Corporations formed under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Here's an overlay of the Regional Corporations on the results map:

Click to enlarge.

Overall Support

Overall, the exit polls show 52% support of Obama among the racial category of Other in Alaska, which made up 11% of the electorate. I'm willing to bet it's pretty hard to do an exit poll in the less populated areas of Alaska, though. So let's go back to estimates

The census records four main groupings of Alaskan Natives. Calculations of Obama's support among these groups statewide shows that the Alaskan Native population is far from uniform in voting behavior among these four groups as well:

Click to enlarge.

Why?

Well, Why Not? Why would we expect much homogeneity across such a huge expanse of territory?

The answer is we wouldn't - and one possible reason is economic interests. In the maps above, we see there is a region of low support for Obama in Northwest Alaska, including almost all of (but not limited to) the NANA Regional Corporation. This Alaska Native Regional Corporation owns the Red Dog Mine, the world's largest zinc mine. Census data show that in this area (NW Arctic Borough, Census Tract #1) 27% are employed in mining (which includes oil), far higher than any other part of Western Alaska. (Note that another area of weak support for Obama among Native Alaskans, in Southwest Alaska, does not show a similarly large proportion of workers in the mining industry.)

What we have is a large state, and a diverse population, relatively small in number, with varied economic and cultural interests. Diverse political views are no surprise.

________________________________________________
This diary is the ninth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: The Latino Electorate: Increasing Influence

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: Islander Americans - In Need of More Representation

dreaminonempty — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 14:30:54 GMT

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.)

Click to enlarge. Exact locations here.
Ten Second Summary

Expanding the electorate is a good thing. Territories that want federal representation - voting federal representation - should be able to get it. And chances are, they would elect Democrats in a nice little progressive feedback loop.

To Vote

What if all these Territories wanted federal representation? Whether through statehood or some other status (which would require a constitutional amendment), let's just look at the numbers for a minute and ignore the politics of achieving representation or whether it is desired.

Puerto Rico: Easy. About the population of Oregon or Kentucky, it clearly deserves two Senators, a half dozen representatives, and 7 or 8 electoral votes.

The rest: Harder. The biggest, Guam, has less than half the population of Wyoming at 170,000; the smallest, American Samoa, has 57,000. Right now we have the Senators from California representing 70 times the population as the Senators from Wyoming, which isn't all that great, but they would represent 646 times the population of a theoretical State of Samoa. That just seems out of whack.

If we lumped the remaining territories all together it's 423,000 people, still 100,000 less than Wyoming, but not that out of line. However, creating one state that spans half the globe is absurd in so many ways.

A combination of Guam and Northern Mariana Islands is more realistic geographically, culturally, and politically, and would result in a state with a population about half that of Wyoming - not too bad.

Another possibility entirely would be to have non-state entities with fractional votes, and current political boundaries would stay the same. So for instance, the Virgin Islands would get one Senator and one Representative, but the Senator would only have, say, 0.5 votes and the Representative would have 0.25 votes.

That, of course, is just the simple mathematical view that ignores people completely.

Let the People Speak

What do people want?

Puerto Rico: 47% voted for statehood in 1998 ("none of the above" actually won); 57% said they preferred statehood over the status quo or independence in a 2008 poll - 77% preferred statehood if independence were the only other choice; and the party advocating statehood won major victories in the 2008 elections, although this is not necessarily because of their stance on statehood. (It's possible these numbers overstate support for statehood because the first choice of many may not have been listed as an option.) In other words, at most about half the population supports statehood, but this number may be increasing. Political status aside, there seems to be greater support for voting in presidential elections, however, as elected officials quickly voted to do so when given the chance in 2000.

US Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa: The webpage of Representative Donna Christensen (VI) prominently features a proposed amendment, supported by Madeleine Bordallo (GU) and Eni Faleomavaega (AS), which gives territories the right to vote for president.

Northern Mariana Islands and Guam: Some distant rumblings of statehood.

Democratic Leaning

The chart below shows how Pacific Islanders and Caribbean Americans voted in 2008; in the cases of American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands, other competitive races were used instead of the presidential race. (Yes, Guam voted for president; their votes just didn't count for anything in the electoral college.) All non-voting delegates to the US House from territories caucus with the Democrats.

Click to enlarge.

Except for Cuban-Americans, we have a bunch of Democratic-leaning populations here - this year. Native Hawaiians and Chamorros are likely showing a bit of a home state (ocean?) bias towards Obama, as he grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, although a contested Democratic primary in Guam probably helped too. Among the entire population (not just Pacific Islanders), Obama improved over Kerry's performance by 27 points in Guam and 18 points in Hawaii, far more than the national average; I estimate about a 20-25 point improvement among Native Hawaiians as well.

Puerto Ricans aren't guaranteed to vote the same way as their relatives who live in New York, either. It's still a strong indication that they would be likely to vote Democratic at the federal level, however.

Because there can be a disconnect between party politics on a local and national level, the estimates for American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands have an extra factor of uncertainty in them. The Republicans seem near extinction in the Virgin Islands, however, and would seem unlikely to improve their lot much in this majority Afro-Caribbean territory. American Samoa, on the other hand, appears to have had (judging on fundraising) a real race for the House delegate in 2008, with the Democrat winning with 60% of the vote.

________________________________________________
This diary is the eigth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Tomorrow: The Native Alaskan Electorate: An Economic Factor?

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: West Asian Americans - Rapid Change

dreaminonempty — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.
Ten Second Summary

Change can happen fast, politically speaking. Previous trends are not guaranteed to continue, and can reverse themselves. There is also an easy lesson to learn here that hopefully most Democrats didn't need in the first place: avoid demonization. And, finally - of course - those with West Asian ancestry are a diverse bunch.

The Western Asian Electorate

I've defined Western Asia in a very broad way here. Immigration data are only available for a few countries, but show a growing amount of immigration like most non-European countries, with a peak of Turkish immigration around 100 years ago. Electoral preferences - some with very large errors indeed - are shown below.

Click to enlarge.

Michigan and Beyond - Arab Americans

As it turns out we have some nationwide polling commissioned by the Arab American Institute to help clarify things. A Zogby poll of about 500 was completed by phone in October 2008, using a list of Arabic surnames. Nationally, support for Obama was around two-thirds of those who expressed a preference. Support for Obama among Catholics and Protestant/Orthodox Christians was somewhat less, and support among Muslims was near 100%. Comparing to the 2000 Zogby poll, the most dramatic changes were among Muslims. Asked what the most important issue was in 2008, Jobs/Economy came in first (79%).

This poll also had data on party affiliation going back to 1996, shown here:

Click to enlarge.

Nationwide, the trend is not as dramatic as we saw in Dearborn, but significant nonetheless. Dearborn, I should note, has a large population of Arab Americans who are recent immigrants, and more likely to be Muslim, along with an older, more established Lebanese Christian community.

Michigan Again - Chaldean Community

Using the census category Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac, a Catholic ethnic group that makes up 10% of the Iraqi population, we get stronger numbers (60-100%) for Obama in Chaldean Town, in Detroit, but weaker numbers in the suburbs further to the north (30-50%). As you can tell from the numbers, I'm pretty uncertain about these communities. However, there's some key differences. More established communities (in the wealthier suburbs) can be traced back to Chaldean-speaking immigrants from rural areas nearly 100 years ago, whereas Chaldean Town has more recent immigrants, who are more urban, educated, speak Arabic, and may have stronger ties to Iraq. Unhappiness with the Iraq war may have been an important factor for those who did support Obama - indicating, once again, self-inflicting injury on the part of the Republican party.

That Foot's Getting Sore - Armenians in Los Angeles

To continue with the theme, another shot in the foot came with respect to the Armenian-American community. Apparently the community used to support Republicans but this year the records of Obama and Biden on the Armenian genocide greatly helped them among Armenian American voters, while McCain had a bit of a 'problem'. In Los Angeles, I estimate Obama had 75-90% of their votes. Pre-election polling (methodology unavailable) had support at 80-85%. Obama's popularity in this community may be slipping recently though, as the anniversary of the Armenian genocide passed without what some believed to be adequate recognition.

Those Feet Are Kind of Obliterated Now - Iranians in Los Angeles

So how does a politician best win the support of Iranian Americans? A little music, that's all it takes. Yeah. It turns out 13% of Californian Iranians think the US should bomb Iran and 7% nationwide favored military action. It should come as no surprise, then, that Iranian-Americans also turned from a solid Republican voting bloc to one with a Democratic edge nationwide. In Los Angeles, I estimate the vote was split, but Los Angeles is apparently home to a more Republican community. The surveys linked to above showed a registration edge of 42% Democratic to 23% Republican in California, and 47% Democratic and 12% Republican nationwide. And while we're on the topic I'd like to point out the religious diversity in the Iranian-American community in California: 35% Muslim, 15% Jewish, 13% Christian, 4% Bahai, and 4% Zoroastrian.

It Takes Talent

This part of Asia is full of ancient enmities exacerbated by The Great Game, stirred up by colonialism, and brought to a boil by the Cold War. It is simply astounding that Republicans have been able to take their relationship with several different communities who have ties to this region and alienate so many, so well, so quickly.

The theme of this diary is that political preferences can change quickly and dramatically. As it happens, of the four groups from Western Asia discussed so far, Arab-Americans showed monumental changes and the rest showed large change based on anecdotes of previous voting behavior. I also included two more groups of recent immigrants found in New York with historical ties to the region - Bukharian Jews and Eastern European Jews (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) - and Americans living in Israel. All three groups showed low support for Obama; for Eastern Europeans, this support is little changed from 2004. So not all communities with ties to this region behaved in the same way - something which should not surprise any reader of this series.

Here's the Elephant

We can't forget Israel and Palestine while we're here. But we do know that only a paltry 5% of Arab-Americans did not vote for Gore (mainly voting for Nader instead) because of the presence of Lieberman on the ticket. Meanwhile, despite Obama being a secret Muslim, Jewish support of Obama does not seem to have changed much from that of Kerry (more on this later). Finally, when asked to name the two most important issues in the 2008 election, less than 1% of Arab Americans mentioned Palestine. Only 8% of Jews said Israel. So, thankfully, perhaps we can forget Israel and Palestine for the purposes of this diary at least.

________________________________________________
This diary is the sixth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History
Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared
African-Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike
East and South Asian Americans - Diverse and Growing

Tomorrow: The Native American Electorate: Increasing Participation

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: East and South Asian Americans, Diverse and Growing

dreaminonempty — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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:

Click to enlarge.

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.
Ten Second Summary
The Asian-American population has been growing and changing rapidly over the past several decades. Politically, there is strong and growing support for Democrats, on average. The Asian-American electorate is far from uniform, however, with very different voting patterns in different communities.

We Are Not All of Us Alike, Reprise
Clearly, the population shown in the map above did not support Obama for president. Some of you may have even recognized the neighborhood - it's part of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans - that's Lake Pontchartrain in the upper left corner. It is the center of a strong Vietnamese-American community, and home turf for Republican Congressman Joseph Cao. I estimate support for Obama at 5-8% in this community. (We can get such a good estimate in part because the Louisiana Secretary of State provides the racial breakdown of those who voted in each precinct.) As to why this community did not support Obama (or Kerry for that matter), I will note that it was founded by people fleeing communism - but I just don't know. The point is that it's a very bad idea to assume that all Asian-American communities (let alone individuals) are generally supportive of Democrats. We are not all of us alike.

Yet all evidence shows that, in aggregate, Asian-Americans nationwide did indeed strongly support Obama and Democrats in general. In fact, in a previous diary we saw that support for the Democratic presidential candidate was growing rapidly among Asian-Americans, from 31% for Clinton in 1992 to 62% for Obama in 2008.

What is the reason behind this trend? Part of the answer could be a bit of identity politics - after all, Obama lived in Indonesia as a child and part of his family is Asian-American. But that certainly can't explain the entire trend, as it doesn't apply to Kerry in 2004.

Everything Changed in the Sixties
The latest census estimate is that there are about 15,000,000 Asian-Americans (including citizens and non-citizens) in the country - or ten times the population in 1970. Over the past 40 years, there have been about 10,000,000 immigrants from Asia.

Here's a graph showing the number of immigrants from selected Asian countries. (Remember, not everybody who comes to this country stays, not everybody who stays becomes a citizen, and it typically takes years to become a citizen.)

Click to enlarge.

After a long history of preventing Asian immigration to the United States and denying citizenship even to those of Asian descent who were born here, immigration from Asia started in earnest following the reforms of 1965. The proportions of immigrants from various countries has varied over time, leading to dramatically shifting ethnic compositions in the Asian-American population. In 1960, prior to the new wave of immigrants, almost half of Asians were of Japanese descent; in 2000, it was less than 10%. Meanwhile, those with (Asian) Indian ancestry now make up 16% of those identifying as Asian.

Click to enlarge.

Diversity of Politics
What if some of the earlier groups to immigrate were more likely to support Republicans, while those who immigrated more recently were more likely to support Democrats? Wouldn't it be fun to see the Asian category broken down a bit? Really, we wouldn't necessarily expect Pakistani-Americans and Korean-Americans to have the same politics, as a group.

Well, through a massive effort, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund did just that. Their exit poll surveyed 16,665 Asian Americans in 11 languages at 113 polling sites in 11 states and DC. Wow! Another group surveyed 1237 Asian-Americans in Southern California.

Finally, using census data and precinct-level results, I estimated support for several additional Asian ethnicities as well.

A word of caution: the results are not necessarily representative of Asian-Americans nationwide. Both the AALDEF exit poll and my estimates focus on precincts with high concentrations of Asian-Americans, and urban and suburban areas. The National Election Pool exit poll, on the other hand, probably has the opposite problem, in that they quite possibly didn't conduct any interviews in heavily Asian-American precincts. Previously we have seen there may be a tendency for those who live in more demographically uniform communities to vote in a more uniform manner, so keep this in mind as you pick throught the following data.

Looking at all sources of data we get these numbers:

Click to enlarge.

One of the important things to notice is the major difference between the voting behavior of Vietnamese-American communities in California (Los Angeles) and New Orleans. Again, we are not all of us alike. The different results for all Asian-Americans between the National Election Pool exit poll and the AALDEF exit poll also stand out. Because of the factors discussed above, I would guess the 'true' results, nationwide, would be somewhere between the two.

Returning to the question of demographic change over time, indeed, we see that the group with the most rapid growth in its share of the Asian-American population - Indians - also has much stronger support for Obama than Koreans, Chinese, or Filipinos. However, this is balanced out by Vietnamese. Only a few points of the increase in support for Democrats can be attributed to the changing ethnic composition of Asian-Americans.

Another possible reason for the increase in support for Democrats among Asian-Americans as a whole might be that immigrants fleeing their home countries for political reasons may have been attracted to the more belicose anti-communist rhetoric of the Republicans, whereas their children, and more recent immigrants, don't care about such rhetoric as much. Let me be clear that this is anecdote-based speculation on my part.

Finally, the last few decades have brought about a rise in identification and advocacy as Asian-Americans, as opposed to disparate and isolated ethnic groups. I've read several sources indicating this rise in Asian-American self-identification was spurred by the brutal murder of Vincent Chin in 1982. Vincent Chin was a Chinese-American bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in Detroit by a white autoworker and his stepson after an altercation in which, assuming he was Japanese, the attackers yelled at him "It's because of you motherfuckers that we're out of work!" The underlying sentiments - Asian-Americans are not Real Americans, they're all alike anyways, and they're to blame for current problems - have waxed and waned in public discourse over the intervening years, along with the predictable and tragic results. What seems clear to me is that such sentiments are part of a nativist, anti-immigration, anti-non-white-American strategy on behalf of the Republican party, and Asian-Americans have been paying attention.

Back to the AALDEF

There are some more interesting numbers in the exit polls, however: native-born Asian-Americans were more likely to support Obama (87%) than naturalized citizens (74%). This is consistent with the anecdotally-based idea above, at least, but far from proof - it could simply be a generation gap similar to that seen among other demographics. It does, however, clearly dash the hopes of Republicans that the children of immigrants might be more likely to vote for Republicans. Indeed, in a separate New York City exit poll, foreign-born citizens of all races except "Other" were slightly more likely to vote Republican than native born citizens.

Another point to emphasize is that 35% of voters in the AALDEF exit poll had limited English proficiency. Without the Voting Rights Act, many of these people may not have been able to vote.

Hey Wait a Minute!
Isn't the Middle East part of Asia too? Yes indeed. In fact, the AALDEF survey included Arab-Americans. In this diary I've mostly stuck to the census definition of Asian as a racial category. We'll get to the rest of Asia tomorrow.

________________________________________________
This diary is the fifth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History
Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared
African-Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike

Tomorrow: The West Asian American Electorate: Rapid Change

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: African Americans - We Are Not All of Us Alike

dreaminonempty — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:00 GMT

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.
Ten Second Summary

African Americans, including immigrant communities, continue to support Democrats in very large numbers. However, even when we see a demographic group that votes overwhelmingly for one party or another, we need to remember that there are thousands if not millions in that same demographic who do not. We also need to pay attention to how the demographic is sampled, as we may see more uniform voting behavior among a specific demographic in more demographically uniform communities.

First Things First

It was the election of a lifetime. The White House, built by slaves, is now honorably occupied by a family descended from slaves. It's the American Story writ large, and a matter of pride and celebration for our nation, the world, and especially the African-American community.

From the trends we saw in a previous diary we would have expected about 90% of African-Americans nationwide to vote for the Democrat for President this year no matter who was running. This means Obama outperformed a Generic Democrat on this mark by about 5%. This also means somewhere around half a million African-Americans voted for John McCain, according to the exit polls. That's a lot of people.

Back to Chicago

It should come as no great shock that Obama did well in Chicago, especially in neighborhoods near where he lived and worked. Nearly a hundred precincts without one vote for McCain, though, is pretty impressive.

In case you're scratching your head, no, unanimous voting for one candidate doesn't support the point that we are not all of us alike. It does show how we might easily get the impression that all African-Americans voted for Obama - because in some precincts (and not just Chicago, but in cities around the country) all African-Americans DID vote for Obama. But not everywhere. So let's look elsewhere.

An Example: Mississippi

Here, too, we saw near-uniform support among the African-American community for Obama. So there's not much point in looking further - except it's a good example of how to extract information from a combination of election results and census numbers.

The following graph shows Obama's performance in counties of Southern and Central Mississippi as a function of the percent of individuals in the 2000 census who identified themselves as Black or African-American only. We see a nice straight line that makes life very simple:

Click to enlarge.

This graph only includes counties where 97% or more of individuals identified as white only or Black only in the 2000 census. Therefore, if we follow the line to the end of the graph, we can get a good estimate of support for Obama among African-Americans in this region. We can also get an estimate for support among whites. If we tweak the numbers using a range of assumptions for voter turnout among the two groups, we can come up with some ranges of support: in this case, 3-10% among whites and 97%-100% among African-Americans.

Now we can go looking at groups that weren't tabulated in the exit polls, using similar techniques as those described above. The graphs rarely end up as pretty as what you see for Mississippi, though, so the range of support I report will usually be much larger.

African and Caribbean African-Americans

There's been a substantial amount of immigration from Africa and the Caribbean in recent decades. We might suppose that African-Americans who are first- or second-generation Americans - especially those from Kenya - might be especially enthusiastic about voting for Obama. On the other hand, immigrant communities could easily have very different politics from long-established African-American communities. Unless politics in the US had a racial component to it, which of course it does. But let's quit assuming things and look at the data for all African-American communities (defined in the broadest sense). Here's a chart, including the location of the community used to generate the numbers:

Click to enlarge.

We see strong support across the board. Politically, immigrant African communities (at least those shown here) seem just about as likely to have supported Obama as other African Americans.

The States

So far every African-American group we've looked at has, indeed, shown near-unanimous support for Obama. Am I just squashing my own argument?

The short answer is no, because even at 95% support, again, that's still a half million or more African-Americans who voted for McCain and cannot be ignored. But let's keep digging.

Here's a graph showing Obama's support among African-Americans as a function of the percent of a state's population that was African-American in 2000:

Click to enlarge.

There appears to be a slight decrease in support in states where African-Americans make up a smaller proportion of the population. That is an interesting pattern. In fact, it brings to mind a similar graph from several years ago - approval of Bush among African-Americans:

Click to enlarge.

The second graph has 18 months worth of data combined - almost 11,000 interviews in each state - which allows us to get rough numbers for African-Americans even in South Dakota. It can be fit beautifully with an exponential curve decaying to a constant.

If we look at the curve from the second graph, apply it to the first graph, and fiddle with the numbers a bit, we would guess that African-American support for Obama in states such as South Dakota might have been in the 70-80% range. Here, then, we have found some place where African-Americans are not so close to uniform in their voting behavior.

Maybe.

Here's a few possible interpretations, any, all, or none of which may be true:

1. This is the prankster's graph - the smaller the population of African-Americans in a state, the greater the proportion of those who claim to be African-American in a survey that are actually whites who are messing with the pollster.

2. In states with few African-Americans, there isn't enough 'critical mass' to form an African-American social community. As we are all social beings, limiting exposure to a strongly Democratic community and increasing exposure to a more Republican community would logically increase the likelihood of an individual voting Republican.

3. African-American individuals who are Republican are more likely to feel comfortable living outside of African-American communities, and therefore we will find that a greater share of African-Americans are Republicans in states without enough African-Americans to form large communities.

Of course, if 2 and/or 3 are correct, we ought to see similar behavior among other groups.

As it turns out we do - specifically, among white evangelical Christians. We saw here that as the proportion of whites who are white evangelical or born-again Christian increases - as the white community becomes more uniform in religion - support for Obama drops among both evangelical and non-evangelical whites. In other words, when non-evangelical whites are a distinct minority in the white community, they are less likely to vote for Obama. When evangelical whites are a distinct minority in the white community, the are more likely to vote for Obama. Remember, of course, that correlation is not causation. Nonetheless, the data are at least consistent with the idea that the more uniform a community is, the more uniformly it tends to vote.

Even when a community overwhelmingly supports one party, though, it's good to keep in mind that there's typically plenty of people in that community going the other way.
_
This diary is the fourth in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History
The African American Electorate: We Are Not All of Us Alike

Tomorrow: The East and South Asian Electorate: Diverse and Growing

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared

dreaminonempty — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:43:05 GMT

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.
Ten Second Summary
Not only are non-whites a growing share of the electorate and highly likely to vote for Democrats, but both non-whites and whites are increasingly likely to vote for Democrats. Republicans are in deep doo-doo. This idea has been gaining traction over the past year, but it cannot be repeated enough.

Couldn't Win Without...
We start with the 2008 results, at left above. It shows a more diverse group of voters for Obama than for McCain. Only 60% of Obama's voters were white, compared to 90% for McCain.

Here's some maps by race/ethnicity of the exit poll results:

Click to enlarge. See note on color. Only states with 51% or more are counted in EV totals.

Note that at the extreme ends of support, purple is used for the most Republican and green is used for the most Democratic support. We see that the support among whites varied dramatically. The lowest support for Obama was in AL, MS, and LA, hands down. Low (but still substantial) support of around 20-30% of white voters was found in adjacent areas of the South and NE, ID, WY, & UT. How well Obama did among whites is strongly related to (but not necessarily caused by) the proportions of whites who are evangelical and born-again Christians in many of these states.

There's only a little variation across the country in support among African-Americans. There's more variation among Latino voters, with the highest support for McCain in Arizona, his home state, and Florida, which has a large Cuban-American population. All non-white voters together show a predictable pattern based on demographics, with Obama's strongest base of support among non-whites also in the South. (Don't worry about Wyoming; it's probably just a small sample size turning it pink.)

Trends - Double Trouble

Not only are non-whites strongly Democratic, but there is a significant trend towards the Democratic candidate over the last few decades among African Americans and Asian Americans. There would actually be a statistically significant trend among whites, too, if we ignore the 1976 election. Added together, there is also a significant trend in the percent vote for Democrats among all races (right, below).

Click to enlarge.

The graph on the right starts with the first election after the Voting Rights Act was passed. Carter's peak in 1976 could be seen as a last gasp of a disintegrating economic coalition, some of whom were willing to vote for a Southern Democrat but no other, in part because of the Republican Southern Strategy, but there's also certainly the aftermath of Watergate tied up in there too and probably a few other factors as well. A cursory glance at individual states shows that the Carter peak can be seen in just about all states, but is greatly enhanced in Southern states. The general increasing trend is also not present in every state. A few examples can be seen here. And finally, don't forget we've got third parties to deal with here too, although apportioning their votes according to exit poll preferences still leaves us with a general trend in the Democratic direction.

Overall, Democrats have been improving at the presidential level at about one percentage point per cycle, on average. About half of that comes from increasing support from both non-whites and whites. To see this effect, we can calculate the performance of Democratic candidates over the past several decades if we assume the demographics of each election's voters were the same as in 2008. We see a steadily increasing trend (with the exception of Carter):

Click to enlarge.

Trends Upon Trends

The other half of the Democratic improvement comes from increasing numbers of non-white voters, in part due to immigration trends, seen here. If Obama had run for president with a 1988 electorate, and done just as well among all racial categories as he did in 2008, he would only have won just over 49% of the vote (depending on turnout), because the 1988 electorate was more white. Again, we can calculate the performance of Democratic candidates of the past, this time assuming they performed as well among demographic groups as Obama did. And again, we see a steadily increasing trend, this time due to the changing composition of the electorate:

Click to enlarge.

Non-whites are making up more and more of the electorate as time goes on, a phenomenon which first came to my attention in a political way via Ruy Teixeira; Chris Bowers among others has emphasized this as well. In 1980, whites were 89% of the electorate. In 2008, they made up 74% of the electorate. Also in 2008, only 59% of 18-year olds were non-Hispanic white, and (as mentioned above) only 55% of newborns. To return to the graph from the introduction:

Click to enlarge.

The black line shows actual census data from 2000. The red dashed line continuing on shows projected data for newborns for the next few years. The other two lines show the effect of immigration - not all immigrants, however, will be able to vote. The lines are all pointing in one direction: Republican heartburn.

The vertical dashed line marks 1990 - these people were eligible to vote (if citizens) for the first time in the 2008 election.

Again, McCain's supporters were 90% white. In a country not too far down the road where only half the voters are white, there will be no hope for the current Republican party if almost all Republican support continues to come from whites. Indeed, Republicans only represent 13% of congressional districts with populations that are less than 60% non-Hispanic white.

The strategists in the Republican party do seem to recognize this, and there's a good argument that many minorities who currently vote Democratic have culturally conservative values that would mesh well with the Republican party. All the Republicans would have to do is minimize the Real-Americans-Are-Just-Like-the-Cleavers tendencies of their white voting base, while at the same time showing that minorities are welcome in their party. Hint: having Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as the de facto leaders of the GOP doesn't help. Neither does tokenism, or calling Justice Sotomayor racist. In fact, it results in even less favorable views of Republicans among minorities - less than 5% favorability as of this writing.

Ding, Dong, the ... Uh Oh.
This is not to argue Democratic complacency. While it's safe to predict that the country will grow less white, previous political trends can be interrupted. And, even if previous trends do continue, trends allow for year-to-year ups and downs. If Obama loses the White House in 2012 with 49% of the vote, this would still be consistent with the trends of the last 30 years.

Every year it gets harder for Republicans in their current incarnation to win elections, because their demographic base is shrinking. But not, obviously, impossible.

Up Next
This is all very interesting, but the categories are very broad. Lumping a diverse crowd such as Latino voters all together? We can do better than that - and we will, starting tomorrow.

________________________________________________
This diary is the third in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back
Alternate History

Tomorrow: The African American Electorate: We Are Not All of Us Alike - even one of the most Democratic voting blocs in the country is not uniform

Cross posted at DailyKos.

2008 Electorate: Alternate History

dreaminonempty — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:45:00 GMT

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.
What if?

Looking back at the history of voting rights in this country, it is not a steady progression but rather a generally bumbling path forward. I ask the question here, what if the election of 2008 had been held under the voting laws of prior times? Below, I show estimates of the percent of the 2008 electorate that would have been eligible to vote at the end of each era, and how well Obama did among those historically eligible voters (by applying the restrictions shown in italics to the 2008 electorate). These numbers are estimated from exit polls, using the income cutoff of $50,000 as a substitute for landowners. Note that the restrictions were not uniform across all states - for example, just before the Civil War, a few states did allow free black men to vote.

Colonial: Adult white protestant landowning males
12% of the current electorate, 31% Obama

To be fair, not all colonies and early states restricted voting this drastically, and laws were not always enforced. The numbers above therefore represent a minimum value, and as such, are an exaggeration.

Jeffersonian: Adult white landowning males
21% of the current electorate, 40% Obama

The newly minted constitution did away with religious requirements for voting, but the idea persisted that voters should be limited to white men with a stake in government, as represented by a certain amount of wealth, land, or the payment of taxes. Again, this was not uniform across states.
For example, between its statehood and 1807 New Jersey required only that a voter possess a small amount of cash or property, with no restrictions based on race, religion, or gender.

Jacksonian: Adult white males
32% of the current electorate, 41% Obama

The expansion of the voting universe continued on its rocky course with the elimination of property requirements in almost all states by the Civil War.

Women's Suffrage: Adult whites
69% of the current electorate, 43% Obama

Women starting gaining (or re-gaining) the right to vote starting with Wyoming in 1869 and Utah in 1870 and ending with the 19th Amendment in 1920. Now it starts to get personal: probably a fair number of us knew somebody who could not vote when she turned 21.

Civil Rights: Adults
95% of the current electorate, 52% Obama

Non-whites have been able to vote since the founding of the country in various states at various times, most notably the post-Civil War era, but it took the Voting Rights Act for non-whites to be able to vote nationwide, without massive interference, and, we assume, permanently.

Youth: Even More Adults
100% of the current electorate, 53% Obama

In 1971 the voting age was lowered, and here we are today.

Back to the Story

Broadly speaking, we see that expanding the electorate has taken place in three steps: 1) Extending citizenship to more people 2) Extending voting rights to more citizens and 3) Making sure they actually get to vote.

So is there anything left to do? Certainly. In a post Chris Bowers wrote about two years ago, there's several things that jump out from the post and the comments:

1) Extending citizenship: Immigration reform
2) Extending voting rights: Ending felon disenfranchisement, lowering the voting age, congressional representation for territories
3) Making sure people vote: Same day registration, secure voting mechanisms, national voting holiday

I might add one more: extending voting rights to non-citizens. That whole taxation without representation thing, conservatives should love it, right? Actually, I was surprised to learn that non-citizens voting in this country wasn't all that rare in our history.

Unions

Returning to that post Chris wrote, though, it was more broadly about positive feedback loops: progressive policies that would make it easier to enact more progressive policies. Expanding the universe of voters is one category of positive progressive feedback loops. The first item on the list, however, was the Employee Free Choice Act. Just to throw this in at the end, here's how the union vote shaped up in the 2008 presidential election:

Click to enlarge.

________________________________________________
This diary is the second in a series taking a close look at the 2008 electorate and exploring three themes: diversity within demographics, progressive feedback loops, and demographic change.

Previous diaries:

Looking Back

Tomorrow: Why Republicans Should Be Really Scared - a closer look at demographic change

Cross posted at DailyKos.

Exit Poll Analysis Suggests Obama Victory Due to Surge in Youth and Minority Voting

project vote — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:43:42 GMT

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.
Countering the conventional wisdom that the voting population on November 4 did not change as dramatically as predicted, the analysis, The Demographics of Voters in America's 2008 General Election: A Preliminary Assessment, demonstrates that African-Americans, Latinos, and young voters cast millions more ballots in 2008 than in 2004.

"The analysis estimated that about 5.8 million more minorities voted in this year's presidential election than in 2004, while nearly 1.2 million fewer whites went to the polls," wrote Greg Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers. "The figures appear to reflect the success of Project Vote and other liberal voter registration groups in registering millions of young, poor, elderly and minority Americans to vote in recent election cycles."

According to the analysis, African-Americans cast nearly three million more ballots nationwide in 2008 than in 2004-an increase of 21 percent. The total votes cast by Latinos went up by 16 percent-more than 1.5 million-and young Americans aged 18-29 cast 1.8 million more votes, a nine percent increase. That the overall totals did not increase significantly compared to 2004 was in part due to a decrease in voting by white voters.

In addition to presenting an analysis of ballots cast from the United States as a whole, the memo by Project Vote consultant and Ph.D. candidate Jody Herman and Barnard College political science professor Lorraine Minnite examines several key states in detail, including Colorado, Florida, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

The Project Vote data is preliminary, and does not speak to "turnout," which is traditionally a measure of the percentage of the voting-eligible population that shows up to vote. Project Vote expects to release a full report on turnout in the 2008 election in 2009 when government survey data on the voting-eligible population comes available. Yet, this preliminary analysis indicates that a significant shift occurred this year.

"There is no doubt that this surge in voting by Americans of color and young people had a powerful impact on the outcome of the election," said Michael Slater, executive director of Project Vote, in a press release issued today.

"Separate opinion polls and election results themselves indicate that an overwhelming majority of African-Americans and Latinos backed Obama," according to Gordon.

"Thus, the appearance of an African-American presidential candidate with a sympathetic message may have prompted the nation's minorities to vote at levels approaching white voters -- if final state vote counts do not upend Project Vote's figures," wrote AlterNet's Steve Rosenfeld last week. "Its findings also suggest the U.S. electorate is not an inflexible assembly of voting constituencies, but has segments that are mobilized -- or demobilized -- depending on the year, candidate and message,"

In an email exchange with Rosenfeld, Frank Sharry, executive director of pro-immigration reform group, America's Voice, said "neither the turnout increase among Latinos -- nor the swing in support to Democrats -- were surprising."

"Telling people you don't like them and don't want them is not a winning electoral strategy," wrote Sharry. "But that is what the Republican Party has been saying to immigrants, Latino immigrants in particular, for the past four years. No surprise, then, that record numbers of Latinos turned out in 2008 and that the swing away from Republicans to Democrats among Latino immigrants in particular was dramatic."

Blue America and the Changing Electorate

dreaminonempty — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:00:11 GMT

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.
A good way to think of these maps is that the normal maps on the left show the results in rural America and the cartograms show the results in urban America. Briefly, the cartograms on the right show the size of each county based on how many people live there, not the land area. Note that while the population changed over time, I pretended it didn't when I made these cartograms, just to keep things a little simpler. Below, the results of the 2004 and 1988 elections, using the same color scale, where the darkest colors indicate more than 90% of the county voting for one party's candidate (Washington, DC and Ochiltree County, TX in 2008, for instance).

Click to enlarge.

This is not your father's GOP

Although it is definitely an Old Party. Below, maps showing the change in vote between the 2008 election and the 2004 and 1988 election. The same color scale is used in all four maps.

Click to enlarge.

While McCain outperformed Bush04 in a moderately sized chunk of the country, when population is taken into account by looking at the cartograms, this area is squished into a small pink stain. Everywhere else, we see nice shades of green.

Click to enlarge.

The comparison with 1988 shows much more dramatic changes, with increases for the Republicans in the rural Mountain West and the South, and huge democratic shifts in the urban areas.

So what can we see? Here, I'll put out several ideas that seem to me to be consistent with the data. We can argue about it in the comments.

1. Campaigning matters.

Almost all of the pink counties in the maps comparing 2008 and 2004 are in states Obama didn't campaign in. It is possible that the reason Obama didn't campaign in these states is because he had data showing that his campaigning wouldn't work in these areas. But, his campaigning did work in some similar areas. For example, Northern Appalachia and Appalachian Virginia and North Carolina, and perhaps parts of Northern Kentucky where residents saw ads targeted for Ohio and Indiana, as well as almost all of Missouri, are mostly green. The rest of Appalachia and the Upland South are mostly pink. Where Obama campaigned in Appalachia and the Upland South, he outperformed Kerry.

Additionally, three of the greenest states are Montana, North Dakota, and Indiana, where the Obama campaign had a much greater presence than the McCain campaign.

Obama was able to motivate his base and change minds, it appears. For example, in Indiana, Monroe County (home to Indiana University) had 23,000 votes for Bush in 2004 and 27,000 votes for Kerry. In 2008, Mccain had 21,000 - a slight decrease - and Obama had 41,000 votes. In urban (Indianapolis) Marion County, the numbers are 156,000 Bush and 162,000 Kerrry in 2004, and 131,000 McCain, 237,000 Obama. Even out in rural Rush County where about the same number of people voted in 2004 and 2008, McCain managed to pull in only 4300 votes where Bush had 5400 in 2004; Obama had 3200 in 2008 and Kerry 2000 in 2004. Obama apparently didn't just get out the students and city folk in Indiana, he convinced many rural Hoosiers to switch from voting D to R on the presidential level.

Lack of campaigning might be evident in the vote totals of some of the pink counties. For example, in Breathitt County, Kentucky, McCain only got 130 more votes than Bush (2671 to 2542), but Obama received more than a thousand fewer votes than Kerry (2205 to 3327), resulting in a dramatic difference in percent (43% Bush, 53% McCain). Could this have been a result of Democrats that weren't comfortable with Obama and just stayed home? Would campaigning have convinced them, as it appears to have convinced some of their neighbors in Virginia?

2. Demographics and development.
Some of the changes in the maps over the last 20 years came about from a confluence of demographics and development. California, obviously, has seen an increase in the Latino vote (8% in 1992, 18% in 2008) at the same time as Republicans have been hyperventilating about immigration issues, helping to color many of the state's counties bright green. Major cities, bastions of evil elitists, minorities, and universities, are also modern-day ports of entry for immigrants from around the world. The cartograms show urban centers trending strongly towards the Democratic candidate - even in Utah and Idaho.

Development, too, has brought on changes as counties grow. One example is Clayton County, Georgia. Here's the vote totals:

1988 R 28,000 D 15,000
2004 R 23,000 D 56,000
2008 R 17,000 D 83,000

Obama's base came out to vote for him even in many states that weren't competitive. Spots of darker green abound throughout the country where there are cities, universities, and minorities.

3. Goodbye, Northeastern Republicans

In 1988, George Bush the Elder won almost the entire Northeast, with the exception of Massachusetts, New York City, and a few scattered counties. In 2008, as the last Republican in the House from New England was defeated, the Northeast is solid blue with some scattered pink counties in upstate New York and New Jersey. New Hampshire and Vermont in particular show dramatic changes. But why, oh why, couldn't we get rid of those Maine senators?

4. Goodbye, Reagan Democrats

Stan Greenburg has an editorial eulogizing the end of a political era. We can see this, I believe, by the nice green spread over the white, working class parts of the Midwest in the maps above comparing 2008 to 1988. Indeed, Indiana no longer looks like such an anomoly when we take a longer historical perpective: Obama's 2008 win simply is bringing it in line with its neighbors. Here's a closeup:

Click to enlarge.

5. Goodbye, Sagebrush Rebellion

Maybe not yet, but it's on the way out. Over that past twenty to thirty years, there's been a large shift towards Republicans in the much of rural Mountain West at the same time as more populated parts of the West went Democratic. Oregon and Washington are thought of as strongly blue states now, but they have very red, but sparsely populated, eastern portions. The split in trends since 1988 can be seen below:

Click to enlarge.

In the past four years, however, the rural Mountain West trended towards Democrats just as strongly as the urban Mountain West and Pacific Coast, and indeed much of the rest of the country. It's still Republican territory for the most part - but hello, Representative Minnick of Idaho!

6. Goodbye, Southern Strategy, Hello, New South

Finally, one of the most famous political strategies appears to be in its dying days. While parts of the South and Southern Plains continued to shift towards Republicans over the past four years, continuing a trend over the past few decades, the New South - educated, multiracial, and urban - is rising along the Atlantic from Virginia to Georgia. And the rest of the South might have done a little better had Obama campaigned there, as mentioned above. Without the New South, the rest of the South just doesn't have enough electoral votes to pander to.

Note: Cartograms based on Gastner and Newton's method as implemented by Frank Hardisty and the 1990 census. Apologies to Alaska and Hawaii, but Alaska hasn't come close to finishing its vote count yet and both have severe home state effects this year. Cross posted on Daily Kos.

Statehouse Races: Please Chime In!

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:30:00 GMT

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.

Most of the info here comes from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), and the StateVote2008 section of their website. Here's the basic layout of legislative control heading into the election:

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.
Here's the breakdown of governors:

And combining the two previous maps, here's the breakdown of state government control:

Back in September, NCSL's elections expert, Tim Storey, wrote an election preview arcticle. At the time, he wrote, there were 11 governor races--Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia--of which only Missouri and Washington were seen as competitive, and both were rated tossups by Larry Sabato, the only election expert cited. Moving on to legislative races, he wrote:

Partisan Landscape
The Democratic advantage in governors is matched in legislatures. Democrats control both chambers in 23 states compared to 14 for Republicans. In 12 states, party control is divided. (The Nebraska Legislature is both nonpartisan and unicameral.) The last time Democrats controlled more than 23 states was before the 1994 election, when Republicans walloped Democrats by seizing the majority in 21 chambers. Currently, Democrats have a 57 to 39 edge in control of individual chambers. There are two legislative bodies that have an equal number of Republicans and Democrats-the Oklahoma and Tennessee senates.
History suggests that success for either Senator John McCain or Senator Barack Obama will produce a coattail effect. Since the 1940 election of Franklin Roosevelt, the party winning the presidency has gained legislative seats in 11 of the 17 elections. That trend did not hold in 2004 when Republicans suffered a net loss of 25 seats despite George Bush's reelection. On average, the party that wins the White House adds more than 125 legislative seats to its column.
Going into this election, there are 3,993 Democratic legislators-almost 55 percent of all seats held by the two major parties. There are 3,310 Republican legislators-45 percent of the total. Only 21 legislators are independent or from other parties.

But, of course, what political junkies really care about is where action is, the places where control is up for grabs:

On The Bubble
At least 28 of the 84 legislative chambers with elections this year can be called battlegrounds with either party having a chance to emerge with a majority. At the top of the list are the Oklahoma and Tennessee senates, which are tied. In nine other chambers (Alaska Senate, Maine Senate, Montana Senate, Nevada Senate, New York Senate, Indiana House, Montana House, Oregon House, and Pennsylvania House) a shift of only one seat would change the majority.
The list of key states that are on the bubble may be most remarkable because it includes several of the biggest states where legislative control could have a major impact on congressional redistricting of large U.S. House delegations in 2011. The house in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, along with the New York Senate, are all close enough to be in play.
Republicans have only a one-seat majority in the New York Senate after Democrats won a special election earlier this year. Democrats have not controlled the Empire State Senate since the 1966 election and have had the majority for only 14 of the past 100 years. It would be a big prize for Democrats.
But many of the closest battleground chambers will have Democrats on the defensive. Republican strategists are especially hopeful about the GOP's prospects in the Indiana House, Maine Senate, Michigan House, Pennsylvania House, Tennessee House and Wisconsin Senate. The key according to Carrie Cantrell, spokeswoman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, is remembering that all politics are local. She says Republican candidates "have had great success by running races focused on local issues and things that matter directly to the district." Cantrell adds that the national GOP legislative effort is meeting fundraising targets and has a strong organization in place.
For Democrats, the best chances for taking control appear to be the Delaware House, Montana House, Nevada Senate, New York Senate, Ohio House, and Wisconsin Assembly. None of these will be easy. Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, is taking nothing for granted. "We're excited about our chances for gains this year, but our candidates still have to get out and work hard."

On October 25, the NYT weighed in with a fair and balanced front-page story, "G.O.P. Senses Opportunities in Statehouse Races", but offered zero evidence that the GOP stands to gain more seats this year. Here are the first four paragraphs. All the spin is GOP, but the facts, not so much:

The bad news for Republicans in 2006, when Democrats surged to power and majority control in many legislative chambers, is now their good fortune as Democrats struggle to retain those gains.
"There are vulnerable Democrats in traditionally Republican seats, and the natural dynamic is that Republicans would win back at least some of these," said Lawrence R. Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. "But the name brand for the Republican Party has taken a hit, and these lower-party races could be one of the places that that shows up. It's a mixed-up year."
Of the top 12 battleground chambers as identified by the National Conference of State Legislatures, a nonpartisan research group, six are considered opportunities for a flip from a Republican to Democratic majority, and six are the reverse, with possible flips from Democratic to Republican control.
Certainly, many Democrats are getting a boost from an energized party and the growth of newly registered voters, candidates and party leaders say. But Republicans also see chances for gains.

In fact, if anything the shitty national campaign has probably dampened GOP chances down ballot. The table below--derived from combining two different NCSL tables--shows where we stand heading into the election.

With the GOP's national brand in disgrace, and an influx of new Democratic voters mobilized during the primaries and after, Tuesday is a very promising night for us at the state level.

Okay, so now it's your turn. What's happening in YOUR state???

Voters Eager to Have A Stake in Historical Election: Early Voting Predicts Strong Turnout Tuesday

project vote — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:47:47 GMT

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

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.
Last week, voters scrambled to register at drive-thru election office windows in Southern California, busy street corners in Wichita, Kansas, and post-naturalization ceremonies in Los Angeles County. These efforts to meet the Oct. 20 registration deadlines in some states are seen as evidence of a surge in voter registration among historically underrepresented communities, including newly naturalized Latino and Asian citizens, and Black voters as well as formerly disenfranchised ex-felons.

This week, early vote turnout gave a sneak peek at what voters and election officials can expect at the polls on Tuesday, and it's "going to be busy as heck" said one official in Orange County, Calif., where registration rates went up 15 percent since 2004. To accommodate the high turnout, which is expected to exceed "the recent high-water mark in voter participation set in 2004," some states are taking precautionary measures, adding new machines and even extending early voting.

Experts predict "huge turnout" of as much as 132 million people, or 60.4 to 62.9 percent of eligible voters this year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The last presidential election brought 60.7 percent of eligible voters to the polls, "the highest since 1968, when 61.9 percent cast ballots." Election officials in many states, including Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico, and Minnesota, have predicted turnout as high as 80 percent.

"We are going to have long lines," with some states expecting voting machine shortages, according to Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate. "But long lines in this election, as in 2004, are not going to deter people from voting, because of the emotional context of this election. They didn't deter people in 1992 or in 2004, and they're not going to deter people now."

Managing long lines has already been a point of contention in key states. In Georgia, voters waited four to five hours to cast early ballots on Wednesday, in spite of last minute changes Tuesday to reduce the eight hour waits voters encountered on Monday, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A combination of "high turnout, staff and equipment shortages and state computer problems slowed the process."

Like Gans predicted, however, these issues are not stopping voters from showing up at the polls bright and early.

"It's a historical event and I want to be part of it," said Hampton, Ga. voter, Dara Christian, who arrived at her precinct to be second in line shortly after 5 a.m. on Wednesday. According to a Tuesday AJC report, a million ballots had already been cast during more limited voting in the last few weeks. And about 125,095 of those were cast as of Tuesday night.

While officials in various counties addressed some of the problems by supplying extra equipment and staff, according Tuesday's AJC report, the Democratic Party and election officials are still pleading with Secretary of State Karen Handel to extend early voting in order to support high turnout, including state Democratic Party chairwoman Jane Kidd and DelKalb County Commissioner Lee May.

"It is not my intention to lay blame on any particular, person or body of government," May wrote in a letter to Handel and Ga. Governor Sonny Perdue. "It is my desire that we don't inadvertently squelch the desire of so many Georgians to participate in the political process."
"Handel said Tuesday that Georgia law doesn't include a mechanism to allow her or Perdue to extend early voting," according to AJC. Handel said that even if she could allow the extension, it would be a "logistical disaster," dismissing Kidd's plea an "orchestrated effort of that political party across the country."

In Florida, on the other hand, after record turnout Monday,Governor Charlie Crist listened to similar concerns and signed an order to extend early voting hours to 12 hours a day, over the objections of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, according to the Miami Herald.

"It's not a political decision," said Crist, a Republican. "It's a people decision."

In Broward and Miami-Dade counties alone, more than 43,000 people cast their votes Monday, "roughly 5,000 more than on any other previous day."

Other efforts to help ensure Election Day runs smoothly for voters are underway, including the National Campaign for Fair Elections' hotline, 1-866-OURVote. The line has already received up to 4,000 calls a day, according to New York Times blog, The Caucus. The group plans to have 20 call centers set up around the country by Tuesday with a capacity of handling 100,000 calls on Election Day.

"The notion behind the non-partisan National Campaign phone line is that if problems erupt at polling places on Election Day, the group will have lawyers at the ready to respond to the complaints," the Times reports.

"So far, most calls have been from voters experiencing problems with their registration along with those trying to locate their polling place, according to Ken Smukler, president of InfoVoter Technologies, the Bala Cynwyd, Pa.company that which manages the call system."

Among those who will benefit from the voter protection hotline and other precautions learned are the large numbers of new voters around the country. Since 2004, voter registration rose 15 percent in Orange County, Calif. where citizens were allowed to register at a drive-thru elections office window last week, according to the Associated Press. Alabama has 76,000 new voters since 2004, two thirds of whom are African-American, according to the Mobile Register-Press. Last week, two thousand voters registered on a street corner in Kansas, about a quarter of whom were ex-felons who until then thought they were ineligible to vote, according to MSNBC. Newly naturalized Latino and Asian citizens in Los Angeles County doubled last year's registration rate with 64,000 new voters this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Up until last week, community groups were "walking precincts, conducting phone banks, holding forums, and distributing multilingual voter guides" to help new citizens become a part of the democratic process.

Historically, Latino, Asian, and African-American citizens have registered and voted at alarmingly lower rates than their White counterparts. In 2006, just 41 percent of African-Americans and 32 percent of Asians and Latinos, respectively, voted in the midterm election compared to 52 percent of Whites, according to Project Vote report, Representational Bias of the 2006 Electorate. But that may just be changing this year.

"We want people to know we're here and our next generation is going to be very important in the process," said recently naturalized citizen, Carlos Romero in the Los Angeles Times.

In Other News:

In Ohio, Wary Eyes On Election Process: Fears of Fraud and Blocked Votes - Washington Post
CLEVELAND -- With Ohio still up for grabs in next week's presidential election, the conversation here has expanded from who will carry the state to how -- the nitty-gritty of registration lists, voting machines, court challenges and whether it all will play out fairly.

Provisional Ballots Get Uneven Treatment - Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- Provisional ballots, one of the fixes the government implemented following the disputed 2000 election, are often proving to be a poor substitute for the real thing.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote.

It's happening in Pittsburgh - Reagan Democrats coming home (photos!)

nyceve — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:35:33 GMT

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!

When Americans finally wake up they roar.
In Pittsburgh Obama spoke of economic renewal, his mother's simultaneous fight with cancer and insurance companies, and his own vow to "end discrimination against sick people" by these very insurance companies. This is the message that is resonating with the lovely people who call themselves Obama Republicans.

Take a look.

Wonder why so many Republicans are deserting their party? Because the party deserted them.

We shouldn't be surprised. By the end of the eight year assault on the American people by George Bush, Republican moderates (my friends from the Obama rally line) were driven out of the party. Today, the depravity of the McCain campaign has even exiled many of their so-called intellectuals -- people like Andrew Sullivan, George Will, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and Christopher Buckley. But, for average Americans, (my friends again), the final assault was the total collapse of market fundamentalism which is at the core of conservative ideology.

Let's talk about election day reality in a critical swing state for a moment.

The GOTV effort which has a ~~huge~~ make that formidable AFL-CIO participation will be responsible for returning to the Democratic fold the Reagan Democrats and turning them into Obama Republicans, or whatever they'll now be called. I saw for myself what's going on. We went to the headquarters of the United Steelworkers. I'm hapy to report that it is an immense beehive of election focused activity. Call it, Leave No Voter Behind.

Here we are receiving a pre-November 4th pep talk from Geri Jenkins and Deborah Burger (Council of Presidents of the California Nurses Association) and Tom O'Brien the Assistant Director of USW Strategic Campaigns at the Steelworkers Union, a monumental icon of American labor power.

Then on to the rally.

What can I say? I was so damn blessed to be there--witness to history. I wasn't in Denver, so this was a real big deal for me.

The pundits seem to think that Pennsylvania will be McCain's last stand, so Obama urged the crowd to vote, vote, vote. He knows the future is in our hands, not his, we're in this together. He is our mesenger, we--the American people--are his muscle.

Please join us inside this amazing event.

This was my first Obama rally so it was breathtaking to see the lines of ordinary citizens eager to participate in an historic event. The lines snaked for blocks.

If the GOTV is as well organized as this, we win. The Obama campaign had volunteers every few feet moving us swifty. The wait was not bad at all, and there were goodies to buy along the way.

When we got to the magnatometers, I was surprised to see them behind run by our friends (off duty, presumably) from TSA.

The significance of the line was the incredible organization, speed and military-like precision which bodes well for election day.

The AFL-CIO is going to be out in force on election day. They've poured millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of union member volunteers into massive voter outreach, which will go into overdrive on November 4th with the most elaborate GOTV campaign in the history of our nation.

Here's a steelworker who was sitting next to me getting fired up and ready to go.

I had great seats right next to the TV camera stand, here is Major Garrett our friend from Fox News getting himself squared away for some fair and balanced reporting.

Governor Ed Rendell, and Senator Bob Casey spoke first.

Then Barack!

And here we are at the end.