Brendan Nyhan

If you missed it, I added some new charts to my post on interpreting primary results after it was linked on Talking Points Memo today. Also, don’t miss Josh Marshall discussing David Sirota’s column and my post in a TPM video:

Ezra Klein flags an email from Hillary Clinton claiming that “It is a bedrock American principle: we are all equal in the voting booth… But millions of people in Florida and Michigan who went to the polls aren’t being heard.” This statement echoes her husband’s claim that Obama has “this new strategy of denying and disempowering and disenfranchising the voters in Florida and Michigan.”

This argument infuriates me. Even if we set aside the obvious hypocrisy in Clinton’s changing positions on the two states, there’s just no way to argue that Democratic primary voters in Florida and Michigan went into the voting booth as equals to their counterparts in other states. Why? Because they didn’t have a real choice — they had already been disenfranchised. As I wrote back in February, Florida and Michigan voters never had the opportunity to evaluate the candidates because there wasn’t a real campaign in either state. Michigan voters didn’t even get the option to vote for Obama. Under those circumstances, Hillary Clinton will win every time.

My posts analyzing state-level predictors of support for Barack Obama were cited by Richard Florida, the academic guru of the “creative class,” in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail:

Ms. Clinton is more popular among voters without college degrees. Meanwhile, Duke University political scientist Brendan Nyhan has crunched numbers that show a college education to be a big predictor for Obama support.

However, Florida’s phrasing is potentially misleading — my results show that average state education levels (i.e. percentage of adults with college degrees) appear to be positively associated with state-level support for Obama. We can’t make any inferences about individual-level behavior from macro-level results (this is known as the ecological fallacy).

On a related note, Brad DeLong posts the following graphic from a David Sirota column in In These Times:

Sirota, with whom I’ve had my differences in the past, constructs the graph by plotting Obama’s margin against Hillary Clinton excluding “the two senators’ home states (Illinois, New York and Arkansas), the two states where Edwards was a major factor (New Hampshire and Iowa) … the one state where only Clinton was on the ballot (Michigan) and … the four states whose Hispanic population is over 25 percent” (CA, AZ, NM, TX).” He concludes that there is a “Race Chasm” of states with black populations of 6 to 17 percent where Obama does especially poorly.

There are several problems with the graph. The first is that the X-axis is not black population, but the rank of black population among the 33 states Sirota considers. While that choice makes the graph look nicer, it potentially obscures what’s actually going on in the data. Here’s a replication of the Sirota graph with black population on the X-axis:

As you can see, the results look somewhat less clear. Now let’s deal with the second problem — the fact that Sirota treats caucus and primary states identically. As readers pointed out, the U-shaped pattern of Obama support against black population, which I noted in my first post on the subject, goes away when you exclude caucuses, which are (a) public (potentially limiting the influence of race on voting) and (b) favorable territory for Obama given the organizing strength of his campaign. Here’s a replication of Sirota’s graph with caucus states excluded and black population again on the X-axis:

All of a sudden the racial chasm starts to look a lot less cavernous. An even more useful approach is to specifically consider white support for Obama as measured by exit polls (the real dependent variable of interest) rather than looking at aggregate results. When we do this for the same set of states Sirota considers and fit a linear trend to the data, there’s no evidence of a “race chasm” — sadly, there seems to be instead a negative linear relationship between Obama’s white support and black population (correlation= -.47):

When you add back in New Hampshire and the heavily Hispanic states and drop Florida, which I think is more appropriate, the relationship is even stronger (correlation= -.53):

In short, the claim that Obama does uniquely poorly with whites in states with moderate black populations is not well supported.

Update 4/2 10:24 AM: Sirota pointed out a typo in the data for Florida that is now fixed in the graphs above.

Update 4/3 9:53 AM: Josh Marshall links to this post, writing that “I’m not sure this apparent disagreement is anything other than the same point expressed a different way”:

[R]acially polarized voting increases with the size of the black population in a given state. That leaves Obama winning a lot of states with few blacks. But once the black population gets into the high single digits, racialized voting kicks in and Obama then can’t get enough of the white population to win. Only when blacks approach 20% of the population does the black population get large enough to make up for and often overcome the increased white resistance to voting for Obama.

I’d tend to agree with that story — apologies to Sirota if I misinterpreted his point.

I should also clarify that, as a commenter points out below, Washington DC is not included in the last two graphs. The reason is that there is no exit poll data available that I’ve seen on the breakdown of the white vote. If those numbers are available, please send them to me.

Update 4/3 1:06 PM: One way to address Marshall’s comment is to consider the rate at which Obama gains black votes and loses white votes as states have more African Americans. This plot graphs Obama’s total white and black vote separately as a percentage of the white+black primary electorate:

Obviously, this won’t work as well in states with significant Latino and Asian populations, but it’s one relatively simple way to look at the data.

Also, a commenter below is concerned that I’m wrongly imposing linearity on the data, so here is an identical plot to the one above with a flexible polynomial instead of a linear fit — there’s some evidence of the relationship flattening out but I’m not sure how much I believe it. There’s certainly no “chasm” effect in white support:

Finally, a commenter wondered about the relationship with the South excluded — here’s a plot that also excludes all of the states that were part of the Confederacy (one traditional definition of the South):

Update 4/3 5:59 PM: Here are two more graphs that may be of interest. The first graphs Obama’s total white and black vote separately as a percentage of the white+black primary electorate again but this time with flexible polynomial fits instead of linear ones:

The second tries to look at combined white and black support for Obama across the range of black populations by state. See what you think:

(Note: There are so few African Americans in the extremely white states that the exit polls can’t estimate the rate at which they voted for Obama. So I put in 85 percent as an approximation to avoid having those states be missing from the graph.)

Update 4/3 8:02 PM: Marshall discusses Sirota’s column and my post in a TPM video.

In his column Friday, David Brooks cites John McCain’s 1983 speech arguing for US withdrawal from Lebanon, writing “This was not the speech of a man who thinks military force is the answer to every problem. It was the speech of one who conforms policies to facts.”

For those are interested, here is a more extensive excerpt from the speech that I posted back in December (it’s drawn from Matt Welch’s McCain: The Myth of a Maverick):

The fundamental question is “What is the United States’ interest in Lebanon? It is said we are there to keep the peace. I ask, what peace? It is said we are there to aid the government. I ask, what government? It is said we are there to stabilize the region. I ask, how can the US presence stabilize the region?…

The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave. We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.

What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay. I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.

I just found a post on Eat the Press (the Huffington Post media blog) naming my Time.com column on ending my guest blogging for The American Prospect as the “Most Overanalyzed Defenestration” of 2006. I’m so proud.

This quote from DNC chairman Howard Dean should be seen as more evidence that big name Democrats are not going to push Hillary Clinton out of the presidential campaign any time soon:

Faced with such disturbing trends, some Democrats want party elders either to persuade Clinton to drop out, or to orchestrate enough superdelegate endorsements of Obama to make her defeat inevitable. But high-profile Democrats, including former president Jimmy Carter, former vice president Al Gore, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, have refrained from such moves so far.

“My job is to make sure the person who loses feels like they have been treated fairly so that their supporters will support the winner,” Dean told The Associated Press.

On the other hand, people are taking Clinton’s statement that she’s in the race through the convention much too seriously. Losing politicians have to claim they are going to stay in the race or their coalition will quickly unravel. She could still drop out at any point. As Josh Marshall writes, “saying she’s in it till August isn’t about August. It’s not even about June. It’s about stamping out doubts about her viability and determination to stay in so she can still be in the game in April and May.”

Here’s the lede to a Louis Uchitelle story in Wednesday’s New York Times about the “political comeback” of supply-side economics:

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, he promised to cut taxes in what seemed, at the time, a magical way. Tax revenue would go up, not down, he said, as the economy boomed in response to lower rates.

Since then, supply-side economics, as it was called — first with derision but then as a label embraced by its supporters — has become a central tenet of Republican political and economic thinking. That’s despite the fact that the big supply-side tax cuts of the 1980s and the 2000s did not work out as advertised, as even most supporters acknowledge.

But advocates see broader economic benefits from lowering tax rates, which is one of the reasons the concept has reappeared as a point of contention in this year’s election campaign, in an amended form.

While Uchitelle does a good job of explaining why the supply-side claim that tax cuts increase revenue is almost certainly wrong, he is curiously non-specific about which politicians are making these supply-side claims — only Reagan is mentioned. (There is an allusion to Arthur Laffer advising John McCain but no direct quotes of the GOP candidate.) The article focuses instead on the views of various economic advisers and economists. But how can a New York Times report on this issue fail to mention the fact that President Bush and other administration officials have repeatedly implied that tax cuts increase revenue? Or that McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson all made similar claims during the GOP primary campaign? Aren’t those relevant facts?

Writing in The Atlantic, Matthew Yglesias does a good job emphasizing a point I’ve also made here — namely, that the reduced partisanship of the mid-twentieth century was largely a result of the ugly history of race in the South:

Yet as today’s presidential candidates call for a less divisive kind of politics, it’s worth recalling the 1950s. While polarization has its drawbacks, the alternative is often worse.

The mid-20th century is sometimes remembered as an era of cozy political consensus, but in fact the corridors of power echoed then with starkly disparate voices… The politics were no less contentious than they are today. They were just less coherent.

The looser partisanship of the period was mostly the result of racism and its complex role in the politics of the time. The legacy of the Civil War had made the Democrats the party of southern white supremacists, but the legacy of the New Deal had also made them the party of northern liberals and many urban African Americans. These latter constituencies were demanding federal intervention in southern affairs to secure the rights of southern blacks. At the same time, many members of the GOP—the traditional home of black voters and the party of racial progress in many states—were resisting these demands, which struck them as violating the principle of a modest federal government.

The result was a muddle.

Indeed, as I’ve shown, the period was a historical aberration. Once the parties realigned on race and conservative Democrats left the party, the political system returned to its historical norm of partisanship and polarization.

There are certainly many negative aspects of this change, but as Yglesias rightly notes, it does reduce the complexity of the choices facing voters:

But for voters, the boring new ways can be looked at in another way—they’re straightforward. Elections have a predictable and easy-to-understand relationship to government action. Electing a Democrat means, on the margin, more spending on the federal safety net and more government regulation, while electing a Republican produces policies more favorable to business interests.

Journalists who lament the glorious bipartisanship of the 1960s and 1970s would do well to remember these two points.

I’ve deleted a couple of choice comments to avoid wrecking the threads, but they’re just too wacky not to share. Full details after the jump.

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For years now, I’ve written about the potential weaknesses of Hillary Clinton in a general election campaign due to her high unfavorable ratings. Ezra Klein disagreed (here and here), arguing that any candidate in national politics becomes polarizing over time. But as I argued, there’s a big difference between ending up as a polarizing figure (Obama, potentially) and starting out as one (Hillary).

If you don’t believe me, consider the numbers. Obama has been pounded for weeks now by both Hillary and John McCain and embroiled in the controversy over his pastor Jeremiah Wright. And yet his profile is still much stronger than Hillary’s. Her current rating of 37 percent of Americans having positive feelings toward her “is the lowest the NBC/WSJ poll has recorded since March 2001, two months after she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York.” The number of Americans with negative feelings in the same poll was 48 percent. Both numbers represent a significant dropoff from a March 7-10 poll showing 45 percent positive, 43 percent negative. In addition, Gallup recently found that Hillary “is rated as ‘honest and trustworthy’ by 44% of Americans, far fewer than say this about John McCain (67%) and Barack Obama (63%).”

By contrast, the same NBC/WSJ poll shows Obama’s personal ratings at 49 percent positive, 32 percent negative. While his negative numbers have edged up, NBC found that “he’s still much more competitive with independent voters when matched up against John McCain than Hillary Clinton” and that “the biggest shift in those negative numbers were among Republicans.” Similarly, CBS found that “Unfavorable views have risen among Republicans” and that “[i]ndependent voters – a group Obama has successfully courted in many primaries and would try to draw in the general election – still view him favorably, about the same as last month.”

In short, to the extent that candidates matter (an open question in political science), an objective observer would still probably take Obama over Clinton. Endi3ng up as polarizing just isn’t equivalent to starting out that way.

Update 3/30 8:52 PM: Via Tim Russert on Meet the Press, here are the positive/negative feelings cross-tabs from the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll — wow:

Here’s the favorable, unfavorable. Hillary Clinton. It is now 37 positive, negative 48. Just two weeks ago, Clinton was at 45, 43. She’s dropped 8 points with her positive rating in two weeks. And look at the breakdown by party. Republicans, 10 positive, 79 negative; independents, just 24 percent positive, 56 percent negative; Democrats split 66, 17.

Obama, his positive is 49, 32. Two weeks ago, it was 51, 28. A modest drop in two weeks during the whole Reverend Wright controversy. Here’s breakdown by party. His positive amongst Republicans is 19. Remember, Clinton’s was 10. Independents, it’s 49. Clinton’s was 24. Democrats, it’s 71. Clinton’s was 66.