Did Race Win the Election for Obama?

John Shonder points to this article by Carl Bialik discussing this article by Steve Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart discussing the 2008 election. Ansolabehere and Stewart write:

Obama won because of race . . . Obama captured ten million more votes in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004, resulting in a 4.6 percentage point swing toward the Democrats from 2004 to 2008. This swing did not occur similarly or uniformly among all politically relevant groups, as forecasting models might suggest. Most of the additional Democratic votes were cast by black and Hispanic voters–4.3 million and 2.7 million more, respectively. Democrats also gained among white voters, but the increase was a modest 3 million votes. . . . Obama gained not only by bringing new minority voters into the electorate, but also by converting minority voters who had previously been in the GOP stable.

This is consistent with instant election-night analysis (see item 4 here).

Ansolabehere and Stewart also write, “had Blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004 while whites cast 43 percent of their vote for Obama, McCain would have won.” I don’t think that’s really a reasonable model, though, because that would be assuming that Obama would’ve outperformed Kerry more among whites than among nonwhites, which hardly seems plausible. To put it another way, Obama’s baseline swing among any group is his national swing, not zero. Given the state of the economy in November 2008, zero just doesn’t make sense as a baseline.

Similarly, Ansolabehere and Stewart write, “Had Obama relied only on a surge among young voters, holding other groups at the 2004 voting behaviors, he would have fallen short of victory.” Again, I think this is slightly misleading: Obama’s strategy was not to do better only young voters but rather to improve upon Kerry’s performance in general, but piling up a particular margin among the young. Which is what he did.

You can also slice up the vote swing geographically, by counties in different regions of the country, and you find that Obama did close to uniformly better than Kerry nearly everwhere, except for Republican-leaning poor counties in the South (where Obama pretty much stayed even with Kerry). The geographic patterns are striking (see graph at the end of this post).

Race matters, yes, but we’re still seeing a national swing.

Finally, I noticed that some of Bialik’s commenters focused on Obama’s racial appeal. I’d like to remind them that the Democrats gained even more in elections for the House of Representatives (compared to 2004) than Obama gained on Kerry. The House gains just weren’t so obvious because they were spread over two elections.

2008 was a Democratic year, Obama was a Democrat, and he won in one of the ways the Democrats could’ve won. With a different candidate there might have been different demographics but roughly the same national swing, and maybe a slightly different electoral map with a similar electoral vote total.

I think Ansolabehere and Stewart are right on the money when they write, “the results of the 2008 election challenge much of what has been conventionally thought about race and politics in America. Barack Obama has accomplished an astonishing political move [by] disproportionately energizing nonwhite voters and converting erstwhile Republican supporters within the minority community without alienating white voters.”

My summary: as Carl said, the election outcome is multidimensional. Because Steve and Charles were writing a short article, they very properly focused on a single feature of the election–race. I’d say that the #1 feature of the election was a bad economy that produced a national swing toward the Democrats in general and Obama and particular. But once you want to break this down by demographics, I agree that ethnicity is the biggest factor.

P.S. Comments here from John Sides. who links to this article by Mark Blumenthal and this by Marc Ambinder. John writes that “Most likely, the economy and race both mattered. Andy sees the economy as more important. I’m inclined to agree, but ultimately time, and more evidence, will tell.”

My response: ‘d say the economy was more important in determining the ultimate outcome of the election, and that race was more important in describing relative differences between the Obama and Kerry vote.

That is, the economy predicted the uniform partisan swing, and race described much of the discrepancies from uniform partisan swing.

P.P.S. Here’s further discussion from Blumenthal.

swings2008.png

7 thoughts on “Did Race Win the Election for Obama?

  1. This entry plus an earlier entry in your blog on the relation between voting and cotton farming over 100 years ago has me thinking a lot about political geography, so here's a general quesrion to anyone reading:

    As in this blog entry, we often divide up the US into big regions (such as "the Midwest") when talking about politics. Is there a commonly accepted way to divide up the US into smaller geographic regions besides states and counties (such as "the Ozarks")? I'd be very interested to see some of the analysis here using these kinds of smaller regions.

  2. I wonder if a different question is also relevant. This post compares Obama to other Democratic Party candidates who are white. That does not address the implicit barrier faced by black candidates. Obama's success is really compared to theirs: He did not alienate the non-black voters. Of course the economy was important (as it is for other Democrats), of course other black citizens overwhelmingly voted for him. But the accomplishment that is drawing so many people to Washington for the inauguration isn't either of those facts.

    What this thread in the blogosphere definitely tells us is that any Democrat needs to do what Obama did. Bill Clinton can claim the same, can't he? Wasn't he called the "first 'black' president" for this reason? So again, Obama's accomplishment is that he is black and yet won, because he didn't alienate too many non-black voters (nor did he alienate too many black non-Democrats, etc).

    Blumenthal quotes Ambinder, "Obama was able to credential himself as an African American without engaging in overt racial politics." Insert Clinton in place of Obama. So these observations aren't really about Obama's history-making accomplishment. (I admit that I'm stretching things a bit: It was easier for Clinton to engage in "overt racial politics" without fearing a loss of white votes.)

    Now that I've read Blumenthal's post, I find his emphasis more useful than Gelman's or Bialik's—as regards Obama, rather than Democrats in general.

  3. The Ansolabehere and Stewart paragraph that you quote seems like bullshit to me, though perhaps you have taken it out of context and the rest of the article is more reasonable. First, almost every election forecasting model predicts a bigger win than Obama had, because of the economy. Second, polls, interviews, and election maps all strongly suggest that poor southern whites were motivated not to vote for Obama on racial grounds. Finally, as Andrew points out, Obama did _worse_ nationwide than the Democratic party as a whole. In short, yes, race was a factor, but overall it appears to have worked slightly against Obama, not for him!

  4. All of these analyses miss the real story here and that is age, or, rather more precisely the voting habits of the younger cohorts of voters vs. older cohorts. The exit polls are part of the problem. For a variety of reasons, they are internally inconsistent. For a better view, I highly recommend this page from Pew:

    http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1018/democrats-post-g

    The only problem with the Pew stuff is that you really need to 'age' the 2004 numbers by 4 years to get a sense for what's happening (everybody gets 4 years older between presidential elections). Then you see that for voters who in 2008 were aged 30 to 60, Obama's support tracks pretty closely to Kerry +5 or 6%, with Obama doing slightly better at the younger end of that spectrum and slightly worse at the older end. Under 30, Obama did much better. Over 60, Obama did much worse than expected. For people over 62, he did worse than Kerry's actual numbers from 2004. The explanation for this difference is pretty clear in the last graph. Obama's support among whites over the age of 50 lagged roughly 3% behind Democratic Party ID. That's the price he paid for not being an old white guy. I suspect that, all other things being equal, Obama will recover some, but not all of that support in 4 years when he is more of a known quantity.

    The real bad news for Republicans is that voters who can only remember presidents named Clinton and Bush are overwhelming Democratic and getting more so every year. The Democrats are on the verge of locking in a 2-1 advantage in voter id for all voters born after 1980. This is the most important shift since 1932.

  5. William: I don't think that all the analyses miss age. I discussed age in my linked blog entry, and Bialik talked about age also. I agree that there's a large cohort effect with the under-30's: that's what everybody's talking about.

  6. Andrew: The way you and the others discuss age distorts rather than clarifies what's actually happening. Take a look at this image from Pew:
    http://pewresearch.org/assets/publications/1018-3

    I'm asserting we should expect the shape of that curve to stay the same, if we 'age' the 2004 numbers by 4 years. Economic and incumbency factors will move the curve up or down. If you 'age' the Kerry support curve by 4 years, move it up 5 to 6% and superimpose it over the Obama support curve, you get an almost perfect fit for people between 32 and 50 (they were 28-46 in 2004). I've done this with that graphic and I'd be happy to share it with you.

    This tells us a lot more than comparing 18-24 year olds in one election year to that same age group in another. While you have to give Obama some credit for his campaign's mastery of the internet, the Republicans are largely responsible for alienating young voters by focusing their recent campaigns on appeals to bigotry (esp. racism and xenophobia). I suspect that differing attitudes on those issues explains almost all the reasons for the change in the shape of the curve.

    Steve Schmidt isn't necessarily less effective than Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, he is faced with an electorate that's much less susceptible to the traditional Republican attacks. If I'm correct that the shape of the curve stays the same, the Republicans will have an increasingly hard time winning Presidential elections. By the time of the next open election (2016), they'll need to move it by 6-8%% just to be even.

  7. I'd say the economy was more important in determining the ultimate outcome of the election, and that race was more important in describing relative differences between the Obama and Kerry vote.

    It's difficult to argue with this, but I'd like to point out at least a couple of things that ought to be considered. First, it's fairly clear that "race" was more important to blacks than whites in this election, although that doesn't imply that blacks are more racially biased. (They might be, but I suspect not.) Rather, it's probably the same group identification effect that caused Catholics to vote for JFK. This is, at least in part, a "novelty" influence, but we'll have to see if it wears off or erodes in 2012.

    There are a number of things that Obama could do to hold the minority vote, that wouldn't require any obvious racial identity appeal, but just about everything he might try is fraught with high risk. He certainly can't appeal to identity politics in any overt way, but he clearly could exploit his "role model" appeal to some degree. (One limitation is that even if he serves but one term, he's still a role model… so a second term isn't an absolute requirement. This lets identity voters off the hook a little.)

    It goes without saying that success is also highly dependent on who opposes him in the primary, and who the Republicans decide to nominate. It's possible that the Rs might opt for a "novelty candidate" of their own, though at the moment that seems unlikely.

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