Nov. 5th: Pre-emptive Retort to Republicans

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Friday October 31, 2008 · 6:02 PM PDT

2008/10/31 · 18:02

If Barack Obama wins the election, one foregone response from some McCain supporters will be that Obama only won because of a tidal wave of black support. Their argument will be that elections are supposed to be based on the collective will of the people, but that this year one subset of the population had undue influence and distorted what would have been a collective will with an otherwise distinctly conservative bent. They will say that this is unjust and undemocratic, and there will be great gnashing of teeth. No one can doubt that such teeth will be gnashed; the only question is to what extent they will be gnashed by the "mainstream" of Hannity, Limbaugh, Fox, and the like.

But there are so many reasons this argument is awry that my brain is on the fritz trying to assimilate them all. Firstly, Obama voters are a multitudinous crew. Any poll will empirically attest to this, and anyone who has been to an Obama event can anecdotally attest to it. Many kinds of people will be voting for Obama for many different reasons, all of them valid.

Secondly, black support for Obama will be only marginally greater than it was for Kerry. Kerry won 88% in 2004 and Obama will win 95% according to the DailyKos internals, an increase of 7 points. Compare this to his predicted increases among Latinos (10 points) and youth (10 points) and it is clear that an Obama victory cannot be attributed to any one single factor. This is true even when considering not just the increase in black support, but also the increase in black turnout.

And finally, it's worth noting that both of Bush's razor-thin victories relied heavily on the support of Evangelicals. Anyone who tries to diminish an Obama victory by attributing it solely to one subset of voters--while neglecting to acknowledge the fact that Bush's victories were much more convincingly attributable to an even narrower subset--is a hypocrite. We can only hope that on Nov. 5th, the pundits with the megaphones will have some sense. Unfortunately, you usually only get to hold the megaphone because you're loud, obnoxious and/or completely devoid of sense.

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