Then surely it would be white voters. If you could get 70% of the white vote, you’d be virtually guaranteed to win every presidential election. But white people have the greatest diversity of viewpoints of any racial group, and so there is no one way or approach that could get you 70% of the white vote - one stance or position to draw some white voters is guaranteed to repel some others.
I don’t know if the statement “you can’t blame her if people don’t vote for her” is meaningful.
Regards,
Shodan
So nothing comes to mind as to something about Obama that might have been a bigger draw for black voters that Hillary could not replicate? Nothing at all?
To an extent, I agree with this. But ideally the representative body should look like the electorate. Not saying that the demographics of the legislatures should precisely match those of the population, but it shouldn’t be as wildly off as it is. When you have half the population being female and zero women on the initial Republican secret committees trying to make a new health care act, something is wrong.
I agree with Shodan. A candidate is responsible for garnering votes. There can be, and typically are, any number of reasons why people might not vote for the candidate. It’s up to the candidate to manage that situation.
Waitaminute. White people aren’t a monolithic group that vote in lock step with each other? They have other characteristics beyond their surface level demographic qualities? Holy shit!
Obama was the first black president, and that is going to increase turnout among black voters.
Hillary wasn’t going to have that kind of draw. Black turnout was 66% in 2012 and 59% in 2016.
Black turnout went up in 2008 and 2012, then in 2016 it went back down to the levels it was in 2004.
http://www.electproject.org/_/rsrc/1494447005873/home/voter-turnout/demographics/Turnout_by_Race.png
That isn’t Hillary’s fault, because she isn’t going to draw the kinds of black support that Obama did.
Well, Hillary in blackface didn’t make it past the focus groups so they were kinda stumped.
But I’ll agree that something more happened here. Black turnout had been growing steadily before Obama and looking at the graph, Obama’s results weren’t some anomalous spike.
One does suspect though that Obama may represent the current ceiling for Black turnout. Dropping from that ceiling to being tied for the highest turnout of Black voters since the '60s is frankly still doing pretty good.
A support for the squandering of Black voting power is the poor turnout of that demographic during midterms - which has NOT been growing steadily and runs about 38 - 40% consistently. Now would better turnout by that demographic for midterms change any results?
It might be a reasonable ceiling but I don’t see that highest since the 60’s. 2016 looks about the same as 2004.
And to my eye, midterm election turnout seems kind of flat across demographic lines.
Re 2004 - perhaps. I was looking at this NYT article’s graph as I wrote. Not sure why Pew’s and the NYT’s graphs look so different.
And yes, Black turnout for Presidential election years as overall increased over a longish trend (while other groups have been mostly flat) but it has not similarly increased in midterm years. Not similarly relatively increasing turnout for midterms may be a missed opportunity to have power. Remember that large numbers of Black voters live outside of cities, many in the battleground of suburbia.
Wasn’t that the title / theme of her book?
CarnalK, on review I stand by my statement even using Pew’s since I phrased it as “to being tied for the highest turnout of Black voters since the '60s” - yes it was essentially tied with 2004 as the highest since the '60s.
But that is essentially a meaningless observation. For the last 20 years, black turnout has been improving. That stopped with Hillary/2016. Of what use is noting “that’s still as good as 2004 and 1964”?
The only thing I can think of is that’s the real ceiling when a black candidate isn’t running.
Measuring turnout for Hispanics comes with some issues that might cause problems making comparisons. The hint is in the word eligible voters. Green card holders can vote, just not in federal elections. For green card holders, every election is essentially an odd year election with the normal much lower turnout rate across the electorate. Those who aren’t citizens and without green cards are not eligible to vote at all. The demographics in question has an above average immigrant population. It includes the majority of those who are here without any legal citizenship status.
Clicking through to one of the links in the first paragraph of your second cite gives us at least some scope without a deep dive. 52% of Hispanics are not eligible to vote because of age or citizenship. That’s compared to 20% of whites, 28% of blacks, and 44% of Asians that are ineligible for the same two reasons. (Pew seems to only be discussing federal eligibility since they include Puerto Ricans migrating from Puerto Rico to the rest of the US as a source of growing eligible Hispanic voters.) Hispanics as a demographic constitute the large majority of those without legal documentation inside the US. Measuring eligible voters seems to be a pretty big deal for accurate assessment of turnout rate among Hispanics.
That’s a big problem when we need to consider how we gather turnout data. We don’t collect demographic data at voting stations. We collect it by poll after the fact. Most of that is by calls to landline telephones. Just having that number tends to provide relatively simple lookup of a home address for most people. If you’re subject to deportation, the motivation to lie to a stranger asking about your citizenship status is pretty strong. It’s not paranoid. The government is actually out to get them.
I’d be surprised if at least part of the Hispanic “turnout” issue isn’t based on overcounting eligible voters.
That number regarding Asian ineligibility surprised me. It implies either that the Asian population is much younger than the general run of minorities or that there’s a higher component of noncitizens, or both.
I don’t know, to me it does look like it could be a one time spike. Levels of black voting spiked when Obama ran, then dropped back down to what they were in 2004 when Kerry ran. If Obama hadn’t run in 2008 and 2012, then black turnout could’ve been a flat line for the last 14 years.
Petty much yeah. An Obama bump of ceiling height by 5% seems reasonable to me.
Thinking about why and the next several posts, I’d be curious to see voter turnout matched by both race/ethnicity and other factors, like SES, education, and age. To the best we can do it anyway.
No, that is pretty clearly not the case. The black voter turnout had been increasing since '96. You can’t look at either graph we posted and say otherwise.