2008 Primaries Thread 2: THE QUICKENING

giving new meaning to the idea of a 100 year occupation

BEST-CASE: disenchanted Obama youth see Clintons steal nomination, help form actual liberal party

BEST-CASE: disenchanted Obama youth see Clintons steal nomination, help form actual liberal party

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.

hey as long as there's fuck slings, i'm there

20% agreed that 'race was a factor influencing their vote', of whom 75% were clinton voters

MSNBC exit poll also has 20% of voters saying race of candidate was "important", but of those they only went 57-43 to Clinton:

http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/the_crucial_racist_vote.php

'only'

there's a difference between "important" and "a factor influencing their vote," so the populations may be different even if the percentages are the same

we don't need exit polls, though. it's quite clear that white people in Ohio and other industrial or interior Southern states don't like Obama as much as white people in other states.

Well, the full question was:

"In deciding your vote for president today, the race of the candidate was (choose one):
-Important
-Not important"

Which is not that different than the AP phrasing.

or, industrial/Catholic. I think we can count MA and NH in this category as well.

the AP phrasing makes it more ok for the respondent to be racist

white people in Ohio and other industrial or interior Southern states

lolz racists be landlocked

Interestingly (or not) no one's complaining that she also got 60% of those who said the gender of the candidate was important.

and how did those people vote?

oh rite, i'm tired

how many of the voters thought Obama was a woman?

the AP phrasing makes it more ok for the respondent to be racist

If this is the case, why did the question yield 20% in both cases.

yeah, some tough guys seem to go for hillary because they figure they'll take the real woman over the fake one

i already addressed that above, xp

i mean, the presumption that the polls are identical has to break down on one of the sets of numbers

i'm just wondering when these fucking superdelegate endorsements are going to come out of the woodwork

i already addressed that above, xp

So the racists were more likely to agree that race was a "factor influencing their vote" but that at the same time it was "not important" to their decision-making process?

Or is that the non-racists who still thought race was "important" in their decision-making process did not find that race was a "factor influencing their vote"?

i mean, the presumption that the polls are identical has to break down on one of the sets of numbers

I think it shows you that these things have a wide margin of error.

284,228 = still enough to win her the state, no?

lol bajillion xps

oh shit naw it looks like she had 55,447 crucial nonracist votes

So the racists were more likely to agree that race was a "factor influencing their vote" but that at the same time it was "not important" to their decision-making process?

my proposition is that asking if race was a factor influencing the vote is value-neutral, and therefore more accepting of the notion that race could be a negative characteristic, while asking if it was important, a higher standard, puts more of a burden on the respondent, and also connects race to the notion of social importance. i think a racist respondent is more likely to admit that it was a 'factor' in their vote, while someone who is voting for Obama because they feel a sense of significance in helping a black man be elected is more likely to identify race as 'important' to their vote.

you're making the assumption that the same 20% responded positively on the race question in each survey, but that they answered differently when asked how they voted. i'm making the assumption that people answered the same as to how they voted, but a different, overlapping 20% responded positively on the race question. i think my assumption is more reasonable.

you're making the assumption that the same 20% responded positively on the race question in each survey, but that they answered differently when asked how they voted. i'm making the assumption that people answered the same as to how they voted, but a different, overlapping 20% responded positively on the race question. i think my assumption is more reasonable

Of course it wasn't the "same 20%" - ie., different people were asked in each poll. What were the sample sizes? Of those the follow-up question was only asked of 20% of the original, an even smaller sample. There are sound statistical reasons to think that this result has a high uncertainty associated with it.

value-neutral, and therefore more accepting of the notion that race could be a negative characteristic

and conversely less rewarding of race being a positive factor

did the exit polls reach the same overall candidate numbers?

you're assuming it was a follow-up question. i'm not.

i don't know the order the questions were asked, but i do know they didn't ask "are you a woman? ok, who did you vote for? how much dollars do you have? ok, who did you vote for? are you a racist? ok, who did you vote for?"

Follow-up or not, the sample of those who answered yes is only 20% the size of the original sample - so generalizing on the characteristics of these people is more statistically uncertain.

http://images.dailykos.com/images/user/3/Clinton_Plan.jpg

wait is this a neil strauss thread now?

xps

i think kos thinks they should do the smear-y fighting for him?

Seems to be looking that way, yeah. That's also the John Aravosis strategy. AmericaBlog has come a long way since the Donnie McClurken nonsense.

so generalizing on the characteristics of these people is more statistically uncertain.

ok, so we can say that of those for whom race was a factor, there was between a safe and a large majority who preferred hillary

Actually based on the MSNBC poll, racists were only negligibly more likely to prefer Hillary than the average voter:

Amnong all Ohio voters she beat Obama 54-44.

Among those who said race was "important" in that exit poll, she beat him 57-43.

That's only a net swing of 3 points - which I'm sure is well within the margin of error of that poll.

57% of 20% is 11.5%, i.e. 11.5 of Hillary's 54 voted on the basis of race (15 if you use the AP numbers), which is well outside the margins of error and victory both.

lol waht?

Readers have been asking about why the Texas caucus results from last night have been so slow coming in. As of this moment, only 39 percent of the caucus precincts are reporting.

Eric Kleefeld called down to Texas, and the Democratic Party tells him, in so many words, that the caucus reporting was voluntary.

Precincts were not required to report results to the state party, but they set up a voluntary reporting system so that the media would have results to report. Nice of them, no?

In their defense, Texas Dems didn't go the route of the Washington State GOP and make a wild-assed election night pronouncement of a winner based on incomplete returns. But at least in Washington State, they promised a final count, and as far as we know, they got one, eventually, one way or another.

But in Texas?

We're told not to expect too much more in the way of caucus returns. Sort of makes sense. If you were going to comply with the "voluntary program," you probably would have done so by now.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/181717.php

Actually based on the MSNBC poll, racists were only negligibly more likely to prefer Hillary than the average voter:

Amnong all Ohio voters she beat Obama 54-44.

Among those who said race was "important" in that exit poll, she beat him 57-43.

That's only a net swing of 3 points - which I'm sure is well within the margin of error of that poll.

-- o. nate, Wednesday, 5 March 2008 23:09 (3 minutes ago) Link

Except the "average" voter pool includes the subset of "racist" voters (I don't endorse that word here, BTW), so that skews the comparison you're trying to make.

Actually based on the MSNBC poll, admitted racists were only negligibly more likely to prefer Hillary than the average voter

per the CNN exit poll, about 7% voted for obama because gender was important.

14% were 65 and older. 20% were white and over 60.

interestingly, Clinton basically tied among OH indies (winning white indies) and repubs, unlike many previous states.

Haven't posted to ILX in a while but having been lurking on this thread in particular.

I think it's naive to dismiss race as a factor in Obama's white vote (or lack thereof) in some places but I don't think it's just a Southern issue (for the record: I'm a white Southerner and strong Obama supporter).

It's interesting that Obama seems to be doing best either in states with a large black vote in the democratic primary (where he wins so overwhelmingly that he only needs 25% or so of the white vote to win overall) OR in relatively racially homogenous states with a very small black population (Idaho? Nebraska? even Minnesota).

What this says to me is that it's easier for white voters, in mass, to support a black candidate in states with very small black populations, not because white voters in these places are less "racist" (a loaded word best avoided in most circumstances) but because their political thinking is less rooted in reacting to race or race-based identity politics.

In other words, white voters in more diverse areas are more likely to feel threatened by a black politician (or, more to the point, that politician's perceived constituency) or uncomfortably implicated in the effects of racial discrimination that politician makes people confront than white voters in heavily white areas.

The idea that only "racist" or Republican white voters are affected by race (if even unconsciously) is wishful/simplistic. As is the notion that this is only a Southern dynamic.

My two cents

-- Hubie Brown, Sunday, February 10, 2008 6:48 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

I think this argument about the statistics is getting off track. If you take the exit poll result as your given and use that to adjust the vote count, then you'll come to one conclusion. If you take the vote result as your given, and use that to estimate the statistical significance of the exit poll result (taking sample size into account), you'll get a different conclusion.

In any case, I think the real reason the exit poll's disturbing to people is not so much the margin. Which is the more disturbing statistic: the 20% of those polled who said race was a factor, or the 57% of that subset who voted for the white candidate? I would guess it's the second subset that bothers people more than the first. It's hard to believe, with something like 90% of African-Americans voting for Obama, that race was not a factor in at least some of that support. However, if you voted for the black candidate, no one is going to get too upset if you admit that race was a factor in your decision. But if you voted for the white candidate and say race was a factor, you will probably be labeled a racist. There are some historical reasons for this, not all of which are bad. But there's a fundamental psychological asymmetry in how these results are interpreted, which goes beyond quantitative considerations of statistical significance. None of which is to say that racism isn't a very real and troubling psychological force, or that it doesn't affect the election in potentially unfair and destructive ways - but I do feel that these exit polls are a rather blunt instrument with which to measure it.

xposts to jhoshea

each precinct was given a folder with voter sign-in sheets and materials to conduct the caucuses. among them was a sheet with a 1-800 number to send the figures from your precinct in after they had been decided.

the sign-in sheets are due within 72 hours of the caucus' close (friday) so that counties can verify that all the voters were primary voters (had to vote in the primary to caucus).

official numbers won't really be determined until the summer anyway as there are a couple more rounds of this shit before it's officially determined who gets what delegates from the caucuses.

remember, democracy is perception.

Can't we PLEASE lock this thread till Pennsylvania?