I was letting my inner Nate Silver call the shots over the past weekend and spent a deeply nerdy several hours poring over the exit polls and election statistics on CNN's web site. [One thought kept going through my head -- I so wish the web had existed when I was in college. When I wrote my senior thesis I literally spent weeks in the library copying county by county election statistics from hard bound volumes. I could have had a lot more drinking time.]
Several things caught my eye, including, of course, the eye-popping victory by Obama in the under-30 electorate, about which more in a minute. Some people have expressed dismay about Obama losing the white vote by 12%, 55-43. This, however, was a deeply regional phenomenon, with Obama prevailing among white voters in 18 states plus the District of Columbia. Here are those jurisdiction listed in order of margin among white voters:
- DC 86-12
- HI 70-27
- VT 68-31
- MA 59-39
- RI 58-39
- ME 58-40
- OR 57-40
- WA 55-42
- NH 54-44
- WI 54-45
- DE 53-45
- MN 53-46
- CA 52-46
- NY 52-46
- CT 51-46
- MI 51-47
- IA 51-47
- IL 51-48
- CO 50-48
Obama won in another ten states in which he lost the white vote as set forth below:
- NJ 49-50
- PA 48-50
- MD 47-49
- OH 46-52
- NV 45-53
- IN 45-54
- FL 42-56
- NM 42-56
- VA 39-60
- NC 35-64
In each of these states, Obama's overwhelming dominance in the minority vote propelled him to victory, sometimes by substantial margins. Although the numbers in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina are nothing to write home about in terms of the white vote, they are significantly better than those achieved in the rest of the former Confederacy. Alas, it is probably no coincidence that these three states have a high number of Northern transplants within them (no offense to our dear friends in the heart of Dixie - hi there MR Bill). Here is the white vote for McCain in the other southern states in order of margin:
- MS 88
- AL 88
- LA 84
- GA 76
- SC 73
- TX 73
- OK 71
- AR 68
- KY 63
- TN 63
In many of the deep southern states - Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi -- there was no gender gap between white men and white women. The gender gap there was almost entirely a result of black women making up a larger portion of the electorate than black men and being slightly more pro-Obama than black men.
Where the gender gap between white women and men is most pronounced is in the more progressive states, particularly in New England. Here is the gap in percentage terms between white women and men in many of those states:
- RI 18%
- DE 18%
- CT 14%
- MA 12%
- NH 12%
- ME 11%
- IL 9%
- NY 8%
- PA 8%
I think there is an interesting story here, although I am not quite sure how to account for this difference in voting behavior in liberal versus conservative areas of the country.
Finally, a couple of observations about the youth vote. A large part of the enormous gap that Obama achieved was due to the proportionally larger slice of the youth electorate that consisted of blacks and latinos. Obama carried whites under 30 by a 54-44, a 12% improvement over his performance with whites in the overall electorate. Obama carried latinos under 30 by a 76-19 margin whereas he carried those between the age of 45 and 64 by 58-40. This may be the single most important statistic in the election. Young whites in the southern United States were only slightly more liberal than their elders. However, the percentage of young voters in the many states who supported Obama was prodigious:
- HI 82%
- VT 81%
- CT 79%
- MA 78%
- CA 76%
- NY 76%
- NC 74%*
- IL 71%
- NM 71%
- DE 71%
- MD 70%
- MI 68%
- RI 68%
- NJ 67%
- NV 67%
* In North Carolina the under 30 demographic was the only age cohort in which Obama prevailed.
Alright, that's a lot of obsessing over numbers. The bottom line once again is that I like where the Democratic Party stands going forward.
