Patterns of Support among White Voters
| Region | Obama | McCain |
|---|---|---|
| South | 31 | 60 | Midwest | 42 | 46 |
| West | 44 | 47 |
| Northeast | 46 | 42 |
Yes, as Stephen reminds us, there’s racism throughout our great nation. But looking at this, and remembering all the stuff I stuck in the first three paragraphs of this post, it’s very, very hard to believe there’s not something special about the Republican electorate in the South, where racial attitudes and class are inextricable.
UPDATED with better link for that argument.
25 comments
September 7, 2008 at 11:33 am
Charlieford
Well, sure. But that overdetermination thing is operative, too. McCain’s war-hero status would be very attractive in the South. Too bad we can’t have an experiment, and run Powell as the GOP candidate, and see how he does. My sense is race would trump military service. (Kerry’s electoral fortunes unfortunately can’t help on this because, as an American Legionaire once said of the VVAW, “They’re not real veterans,” and I imagine that sentiment would be shared in many quarters of the south.)
September 7, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Spike
Racism in the South? Inconceivable.
September 7, 2008 at 1:25 pm
John Emerson
Was McCain strong in the South in 2000? My memory is that he wasn’t. A lot of the hard core hated him then, and he’s had to work pretty hard to get them back.
My index of racism is anti-miscegenation laws, which got 42% support in Alabama in 2000. That’s really pretty much pure racism, and not a proxy like affirmative action. One of the social scientists here should correlate the miscegenation votes with the Bush votes that year.
Nationally I believe that support for anti-miscegenation laws is about 20%. Correlating Republican and Bush support nationally would be interesting too.
September 7, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Ben Alpers
Apropos of all this, Nate Silver wrote a very interesting post some months ago on his indispensable poll-analysis site fivethirtyeight.com about political similarities among the various states. It’s well worth reading. What’s most interesting is that some states are most politically similar to states outside their region, e.g. Illinois is the state most similar to California; Pennsylvania is the state most similar to Florida.
Also: Eric, any hints on reading the Andrew Gelman .pdf file you’ve linked to? When I open it in Acrobat, most of the text is so light that it’s indecipherable.
September 7, 2008 at 3:03 pm
John Emerson
Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota cluster in that table. I’ve lived in these three states for 2, 30+, and 22 years respectively. I guess that’s my comfort zone.
September 7, 2008 at 4:09 pm
silbey
Was McCain strong in the South in 2000?
Strong against whom? Bush? No. That’s not quite the same thing, though.
September 7, 2008 at 4:11 pm
eric
Ben, better link added. (I hope it’s better.)
September 7, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Ben Alpers
Thanks, Eric. Much better!
Strong against whom? Bush? No. That’s not quite the same thing, though.
Thanks, silbey! Can we forever banish the argument that a candidate’s performance in the primaries against a candidate from his or her own party in any way predicts that candidate’s performance in the general election? I got so sick of hearing this argument repeated as a mantra by Clinton supporters during the primary campaign to raise questions about Obama’s likely general election performance, e.g., in Pennsylvania (where he seems to be doing fine) or among Latino voters (among whom he’s killing McCain).
September 7, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Charlieford
“Can we forever banish the argument that a candidate’s performance in the primaries against a candidate from his or her own party in any way predicts that candidate’s performance in the general election?” We certainly should. For myself, I’m often voting against someone more than for someone else, so primary voting has little predictive power. This year, I’ll definitely be voting to keep the Governor of Alaska as far away from the Oval Office as possible.
September 7, 2008 at 7:27 pm
silbey
Clinton supporters during the primary campaign to raise questions about Obama’s likely general election
We probably also have to banish the idea that *winning* in the primaries necessarily translates into winning in the general, too (Obama beat Clinton in a lot of states where he’s getting clobbered by McCain).
September 7, 2008 at 7:28 pm
silbey
Not to be a spoilsport, or anything.
September 7, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Ben Alpers
You’re of course right, silbey, though to give the Obama crew a little credit, I don’t think they ever made the argument that they’d be competitive in November in every state they won in the spring.
September 7, 2008 at 8:31 pm
John Emerson
Is McCain stronger in the South then Generic Republican? I don’t think so. I was responding to Charlieford, who seemed to be saying that McCain is in some way especially strong in the South.
September 8, 2008 at 6:33 am
silbey
I don’t think they ever made the argument that they’d be competitive in November in every state they won in the spring.
I’m not sure they made the argument that they’d be competitive in *every* state they won in the spring, but surely the Obama campaign has been arguing that they were going to broaden the electoral map out? That’s a version of said argument.
And, on the Clintons, note that they haven’t actually been proved wrong yet. Their overall argument–that Obama was going to have trouble winning the general election–is still in play and will be until November. Stuff like this isn’t helping.
September 8, 2008 at 6:52 am
Ben Alpers
I’m not sure they made the argument that they’d be competitive in *every* state they won in the spring, but surely the Obama campaign has been arguing that they were going to broaden the electoral map out? That’s a version of said argument.
They have argued that they are broadening the electoral map, but, as far as I’ve seen, they’ve made that argument on the basis of their organizing efforts, not their primary/caucus results.
Whether or not the claim turns out to be true, saying “we’re broadening the electoral map” is not the same thing as saying “our primary victories in red states indicate that we’re broadening the electoral map.”
The Clintons’ argument that Obama wouldn’t do well in states and with demographics that Clinton won is, still, totally fallacious. Obama is doing fine, for example, with Latino voters.
Whether or not the Clintons were right in their broader argument that Obama can’t win is not really empirically provable. Even if Obama happens to lose, it’s not quite evidence that he couldn’t have won. And if Obama does lose, that won’t provide any obvious evidence that Clinton would have won (though my guess is that’s all we’ll be hearing for weeks after a McCain victory).
In the interest of full disclosure: I’m not particularly excited by the prospect of an Obama presidency, but one of the reasons I’ve donated to Obama is the hope that we might, once and for all, reduce the importance of the Clintons in our national life.
September 8, 2008 at 7:08 am
silbey
They have argued that they are broadening the electoral map, but, as far as I’ve seen, they’ve made that argument on the basis of their organizing efforts, not their primary/caucus results.
Hmm. We may be splitting hairs. The arguments I’ve seen were that the organizing efforts helped win the primaries and would also help win the general. That strikes me–as I said in my previous post–as a version of the same argument.
Whether or not the Clintons were right in their broader argument that Obama can’t win is not really empirically provable.
Did the Clintons argue that he couldn’t, under any circumstance, win or that he would find it much more difficult to win? I understood the latter.
empirically provable
Well, of course, it doesn’t. None of this is empirically provable. That also applies to all of history (if by empirically you mean ‘beyond all shadow of doubt’).
that won’t provide any obvious evidence that Clinton would have won
I didn’t invoke that part of their argument.
reduce the importance of the Clintons in our national life
I have my problems with the Clintons as well, but we would do well to remember that there are two living Democrats who can claim to have won a Presidential election. I discount Jimmy Carter’s victory a bit because it came in the immediate post-Watergate era and because it was the last gasp of the Democratic Solid South (look at this, ye mighty, and despair). You could probably do the same thing for Clinton’s 1992 election (Perot and all that), but the overall point remains. And Clinton is the only Democratic politician to win *two* Presidential elections since Roosevelt.
So when they say that Obama might have trouble winning the general, I pay attention to that, for all that it’s during a heated campaign.
September 8, 2008 at 8:28 am
Ben Alpers
I have my problems with the Clintons as well, but we would do well to remember that there are two living Democrats who can claim to have won a Presidential election.
Three, actually, though only two got to serve as President.
September 8, 2008 at 8:29 am
Matt Weiner
I’ll split some more hairs: I don’t think the argument about organizing is a version of the same argument, unless they explicitly said that the organizing effort would help win the general in the same states. What seems more likely is that they’re saying that the organizing effort provides a bonus, which helps them broaden the map, but not necessarily into the states where they won the primaries.
Most of the specific talk about broadening the map I’ve seen has had to do with the West (like Colorado, Montana, and Alaska pre-Palin), and a couple of southern states like North Carolina and occasionally Georgia — I assume Virginia and Florida don’t even count as map-broadening for these purposes. And that seems borne out by their organizing efforts. They had a ridiculous margin in the South Carolina primary, but they’re not trying to contest the state. (Also part of the fifty-state strategy is organizing in states you don’t think you’ll win.)
September 8, 2008 at 9:25 am
dana
What Weiner said; the claim about broadening the map was the claim that this wasn’t going to be just a re-run of 2004, perhaps putting the West back in play, not a claim that Obama thought he’d win states in which he had a large margin over Clinton.
September 8, 2008 at 10:52 am
September 7 2008 (a day late :-) ) « blueollie
[...] of the American West: shows McCain’s support among white voters by region (Northeast, West, South, Midwest). Guess what region he leads by a 2-1 margin? Note: the other [...]
September 8, 2008 at 11:00 am
silbey
Three, actually, though only two got to serve as President
Good point. (wanders off, muttering imprecations about the Supreme Court).
I don’t think the argument about organizing is a version of the same argument, unless they explicitly said that the organizing effort would help win the general in the same states.
Uh, my impression is that they talked about the ground game all the time as helping them in the primaries and that that would translate (in some states) into the general.
September 8, 2008 at 11:19 am
Ben Alpers
I think Matt and Dana’s point was that Obama’s campaign didn’t say “because we beat our Democratic opponent, we will beat McCain in state X” which was Clinton’s irrational argument, but rather “in beating our Democratic opponent we built a ground operation that will help in the general election,” which is a much more sensible point.
September 8, 2008 at 12:12 pm
silbey
My understanding of the two arguments is 1) that the Clintons were arguing that Obama would have more difficult winning the general election than Clinton would. That seems to me unproven but not unreasonable. 2) The Obama campaign’s argument was that they were going to broaden the electoral map out and be competitive in states where Democrats have not been, recently. That also seems to me a reasonable argument, though it remains unproven as well.
September 13, 2008 at 8:03 am
gravity’s rainbow » What I’ve noticed
[...] what I observed growing up in the South, I’d say this has a lot more to do with racism than [...]
September 14, 2008 at 10:24 am
Ibod Catooga
Racists are faggots!