Southern (and Prarie) Whites as a Separate Ethnicity: I Want a Referee Here!: Early Monday Focus for April 28, 2014

Larry Bartels does not like Nate Cohn’s piece in The Upshot on America’s (and Obama’s: but largely America’s) big problem–that southern (and prairie) whites seem to be separating themselves from the rest of us in their political (and other) attitudes to a remarkable degree.

I badly need a referee here to sort out the arguments. Is there one?

Southern Whites Loyalty to G O P Nearing That of Blacks to Democrats NYTimes com

Nate Cohn: Southern Whites’ Loyalty to G.O.P. Nearing That of Blacks to Democrats: “Mr. Obama’s so-called new coalition of young and nonwhite voters…

…turned out in record numbers in 2012. The Democratic majority has failed to materialize because the Republicans made large, countervailing and unappreciated gains of their own among white Southerners. From the high plains of West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia, white voters opposed Mr. Obama’s re-election in overwhelming numbers. In many counties 90 percent of white voters chose Mitt Romney, nearly the reversal of the margin by which black voters supported Mr. Obama.

While white Southerners have been voting Republican for decades, the hugeness of the gap was new. Mr. Obama often lost more than 40 percent of Al Gore’s support among white voters south of the historically significant line of the Missouri Compromise…. It is no exaggeration to suggest that in these states the Democrats have become the party of African Americans and that the Republicans are the party of whites…

Larry Bartels: No, Southern whites are not the new blacks: “The closest Cohn comes to justifying the headline claim…

…is to note that “In many counties 90 percent of white voters chose Mitt Romney, nearly the reversal of the margin by which black voters supported Mr. Obama.” A handsome national map accompanying the post (but not in print) does indeed show many Southern counties shaded orange. But the map actually shows counties in which “Obama won 20% or less of the white vote in 2012,” not 10 percent. So how “many” counties in the map actually support the claim in the text? And more importantly, what share of the overall population of the South do they include? If — as my rough perusal suggests — populous counties are conspicuously unshaded, the map may be quite misleading in more ways than one…

NewImageKevin Drum: The Democrats’ Southern White Problem: “Pew did a survey shortly before the election…

…that showed Obama winning by three percentage points. This is pretty close to the final result…. So what do they say about the white vote? Here it is in colorful bar chart format. One of these bars is not like the other. Obviously Democrats could stand to do better with white voters in the West and Midwest, but the real reason for their poor national showing among whites is the South. Overall, Obama won about 46 percent of the white vote outside the South and 27 percent of the white vote in the South…. Democrats don’t have a white problem. They have a Southern white problem, and that’s a whole different thing. The press should be more careful about how they report this…

John Sides: Supplying a Little Political Science for Charles Blow: “That the political behavior of whites depends…

…on the size of the surrounding population of blacks has been well-known in political science for more than 60 years—at least since 1949, when political scientist V.O. Key wrote his magisterial Southern Politics in State and Nation.

Key found that the behavior of Southern whites in the so-called “black belt” was distinctive: in these areas where blacks made up a larger fraction of the population, whites were particularly focused on maintaining their own political power.  This notion became known as “racial threat.”  Eric Oliver summarizes the theory as it developed after Key:

…superordinate groups become more racially hostile as the size of a proximate subordinate group increases, which putatively threatens the former’s economic and social privilege.

To be clear, my point is not that the dynamics of the Jim Crow South obtain today.  Nor am I suggesting that opposition to Obama is solely about racial hostility—although racial hostility does appear to play a role…

April 25, 2014

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