A thorough refutation of the idea New Hampshire is racist:

Zynx

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Jan-09-08 08:12 PM
Original message

A thorough refutation of the idea New Hampshire is racist:

Look, there is a lot of talk about the supposed racism of the Democratic result in New Hampshire and the supposed "Bradley Effect" at work there. This is utter garbage and I will dispel it with a few simple facts.

1. Obama won the white male vote. That's a simple fact and he won it big. Historically this is where you look for racism in elections. He performed right in line with expectations among those voters.

2. Obama won the rural vote. Look at the counties and towns he won. Those are sparsely populated rural places, once again usually centers of the racist vote.

3. Polling is not infallible. No one expect Carol Shea-Porter to win in the eastern district of New Hampshire in 2006 based on polling and she did it reasonably comfortably. Likely voter models can be wrong, particularly in high turnout elections. Georgia 2002 was another case. Nobody expected Sonny Purdue to beat Roy Barnes as he trailed by 8-10 points and he won by 5.

4. Obama performed within the range of his percentages in polling. He was expected to get 38%, he got 37%. Hillary just performed better.

5. Massachusetts voted for Governor Patrick by...23% in 2006. This either outperformed his polling or was inline. Is neighboring New Hampshire really that different?

Now I want to even take on the "Bradley Effect" notion in the first place. The notion is that African American politicians do worse than expected due to a hidden racist vote due to the race between the African American mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley versus Mike Deukmejian in 1982 for governor of California in which Bradley underperformed his polling. However, when it is actually looked at more closely, Bradley was leading by 7 points according to the final Field Poll, not a huge lead. He lost by a margin of less than 1%. However, if you examine it even closer you find that his margin was 49-42%, not exactly overwhelming and he lost 50-49%. This sort of thing happens all of the time. In Montana Jon Tester was projected to win by more than four points in 2006 and barely won at all. There was a very reliable Mason-Dixon poll in Rhode Island in 2006 that showed Lincoln Chaffee leading by a point and he lost by seven. Those last two were both white candidate versus white candidate in very white states.

Let's even examine the Douglas Wilder race back in 1989 where he underperformed by some ten points going into the election and barely won in Virginia. He was an African American running against a white candidate. However, Virginia polling used to be awful for some reason. Perhaps it overpolled Democrats for quite a while not taking into account the shift of the state to the Republicans. In 1997, Jim Gilmore led in the final Washington Post poll by 7 percent and won by 13% running against a white Democratic opponent. In 2001, Democrat Mark Warner led by double digits and won by little more than 5%. Granted, in the 2005 and 2006 races polling seemed pretty close, but there was volatility.

The point of all of this is, to look at a series of polls taken over only about three days before New Hampshire voting and pointing at New Hampshire voters and yelling "RACISTS!!!!" is not only incorrect, but it is also destructive. It sours the mood and potentially hurts the Democratic Party.

http://bqreport.blogspot.com/2008/01/vote-in-new-hampshire-did-not-reflect.html

This is on my blog as well.