The Political Parties and race (not visa versa)

[cthulu2016]

Last edited Mon Jun 18, 2012, 02:33 AM - Edit history (1)

I've been interested recently in the degree to which the republican part is a racial identity party, and why it is not generally considered a racial identity party in the media.

Consider these two questions:
How do different ethnic groups vote?
What is the ethnic composition of the two parties?

Those are actually very different questions.

Our national political discourse tends to focus on the first while ignoring the second. The Democratic Party is often discussed in racial identity terms, but it is far from a racial identity party. The Republican party is clearly a racial identity party, but is seldom discussed as such.

The reader probably knows that black voters go Democratic 90%. (And went 95% for Obama.) But that is an observation about black voters, not about the Democratic party. If we turn it around and look at the party, 22% of Obama voters were black.

(I think that almost all Americans who are not political junkies would guess that number was higher than 22%.)

McCain won white voters roughly 55%-45%. If we look at voters, the Republican party always wins the majority of white votes but the overall white vote is fairly diverse in party preference. But if we look at parties, the Republican party is not diverse. 90% of the McCain vote was white.

Looking at the parties, the Democratic party looks something like America while the Republican party is all white.


In 2008:

90% of McCain votes were from white people
10% of McCain votes were from all combined non-whites

60% of Obama votes were from white people
22% of Obama votes were from black people
18% of Obama votes were from latino, asian, and "other"

[cthulu2016]

1. .

[SnohoDem]

2. K&R

This is very interesting, but it would be good to provide a source for the statistics. (I may want to use them in an argument with a Republican, racist 'friend').

[cthulu2016]

3. I actually had to calculate them (!)

The idea for the OP came from trying to look up what percentage of the McCain vote was white and finding that it just isn't ever expressed that way. I knew off the top of my head that McCain got 55% of the white vote and Obama got 95% of the black vote because those stats are mentioned often, but, even being a politics and stats junkie, I did not know what percentage of the McCain vote total was white.

It just isn't expressed that way. And that got me wondering about why it isn't ever expressed that way, and how things would look from that perspective. So i made some quick calculations from what information we do have.

The exit poll tells what percentage of the electorate each group was, and how the two candidates did in the group. So I calculated the total % points (% of the whole electorate) each candidate got from each group:

White (74%) 43% 55% 2%. So of those 74 percentage points Obama got 31.8 of them and McCain got 40.7 of them.
African-American (13%) 95% 4% 1% —Obama 12.4, McCain .5
Latino (9%) 67% 31% 2% —Obama 6, McCain 3
Asian (2%) 62% 35% 3% —Obama 1.2, McCain .7
Other (3%) 66% 31% 3% —Obama 2, McCain .9

Obama got 53% of the total vote. He got 31.8 % points of the total from white voters. (43% x 74%), so Obama's vote total was 60% white.

And so on.

McCain's line is 45.7% of the vote made up of:
40.7 points (white), .5 points (black), 3 points (latino), 1.4 points (asian & other)
So about 90% white, 10% non-white.

Obama's line is 52.9% of the vote made up of:
31.8 points (white), 12.4 points (black), 6 points (latino), 2.7 points (asian & other)

So about 60% white, 23% African-American, 11.3 latino.


The exit polling ethnic percentages of the electorate are rounded so they actually add up to more than 100%, so these figures are not exact. (I shaved .5 points from Obama's Asian plus Other total to match the popular vote totals because he was getting the benefit of that rounding up in the smaller groups.)

The inexactitude is slight, though. We can be pretty sure that the exit polling data says that, for instance, McCain's vote total was 89%-91% white and Obama's vote total was 59%-61% white.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1023/exit-poll-analysis-2008
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_percentage_of_white_voters_voted_for_McCain
http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=USP00p1

[YoungDemCA]

4. This is an uncomfortable and potentially explosive subject for many...

...but you make a good point.

The Republican Party is, in terms of many different measures of social class (race, income, wealth, religion, gender, and sexual orientation) the party of the privileged in America.

Not to say that the Democrats don't have their socially privileged members, of course. Or that the Republicans don't have some under-privileged voters among them. But as a generalization of the two parties, the Republicans are less representative of the country in general, especially when it comes to the socially disenfranchised members of the population-and thus, this makes them less sensitive to those people's struggles.

[cthulu2016]

5. Very good point, and uncomfortable indeed...

I think that to make sense of the Republican party coalition we have to treat "whiteness" as being akin to "rich."

What unifies the Republican billionaire and the the Republican pauper is that both have something to which they feel entitled, and which "the others" want to take away. That is the psychology exploited/developed by the rich to provide the voting cannon fodder they need.

In one case, the billions of dollars.

In the other case, the social asset value of white skin.

In a just world the billions would be taxed more and the white skin would have no intrinsic advantage.

Ans add to that the social asset value of maleness.