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.
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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.
Tomorrow: The East and South Asian Electorate: Diverse and Growing
Cross posted at Open Left.
Diaries in this series (updated list):
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
Native Alaskans – An Economic Factor?
Latino Electorate – Increasing Influence
European-Americans – Tribal Politics Persist
“Americans” – You Might Be Surprised
Appalachia – Surprisingly Democratic
Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really Scared
Why Republicans Should Be Really, Really, Really Scared
A Few More Tidbits
Related 2008 electorate diaries:
Maps: Blue America and the Changing Electorate
Maps: Obama and White Evangelicals
PS Here's a hint for the Poll- a map of Chicago neighborhoods.
