Obama won because of race . . . Obama captured ten million more votes in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004, resulting in a 4.6 percentage point swing toward the Democrats from 2004 to 2008. This swing did not occur similarly or uniformly among all politically relevant groups, as forecasting models might suggest. Most of the additional Democratic votes were cast by black and Hispanic voters–4.3 million and 2.7 million more, respectively. Democrats also gained among white voters, but the increase was a modest 3 million votes. . . . Obama gained not only by bringing new minority voters into the electorate, but also by converting minority voters who had previously been in the GOP stable.

This is consistent with instant election-night analysis (see item 4 here).

Ansolabehere and Stewart also write, “had Blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004 while whites cast 43 percent of their vote for Obama, McCain would have won.” I don’t think that’s really a reasonable model, though, because that would be assuming that Obama would’ve outperformed Kerry more among whites than among nonwhites, which hardly seems plausible. To put it another way, Obama’s baseline swing among any group is his national swing, not zero. Given the state of the economy in November 2008, zero just doesn’t make sense as a baseline.

Similarly, Ansolabehere and Stewart write, “Had Obama relied only on a surge among young voters, holding other groups at the 2004 voting behaviors, he would have fallen short of victory.” Again, I think this is slightly misleading: Obama’s strategy was not to do better only young voters but rather to improve upon Kerry’s performance in general, but piling up a particular margin among the young. Which is what he did.

You can also slice up the vote swing geographically, by counties in different regions of the country, and you find that Obama did close to uniformly better than Kerry nearly everwhere, except for Republican-leaning poor counties in the South (where Obama pretty much stayed even with Kerry). The geographic patterns are striking (see graph at the end of this post).

Race matters, yes, but we’re still seeing a national swing.

Finally, I noticed that some of Bialik’s commenters focused on Obama’s racial appeal. I’d like to remind them that the Democrats gained even more in elections for the House of Representatives (compared to 2004) than Obama gained on Kerry. The House gains just weren’t so obvious because they were spread over two elections.

2008 was a Democratic year, Obama was a Democrat, and he won in one of the ways the Democrats could’ve won. With a different candidate there might have been different demographics but roughly the same national swing, and maybe a slightly different electoral map with a similar electoral vote total.

I think Ansolabehere and Snyder are right on the money when they write, “the results of the 2008 election challenge much of what has been conventionally thought about race and politics in America. Barack Obama has accomplished an astonishing political move [by] disproportionately energizing nonwhite voters and converting erstwhile Republican supporters within the minority community without alienating white voters.”

My summary: as Carl said, the election outcome is multidimensional. Because Steve and Charles were writing a short article, they very properly focused on a single feature of the election–race. I’d say that the #1 feature of the election was a bad economy that produced a national swing toward the Democrats in general and Obama and particular. But once you want to break this down by demographics, I agree that ethnicity is the biggest factor.

I’m not sure why Andrew finds it difficult to believe in balancing, at least on the margin. After all, we’re not too surprised when partisan tides or “coattails” happen, as we’ve just seen in 2006 and 2008. Even long serving incumbents get the boot if they’re the unfavored party. But the key is that people don’t really understand the aggregate consequences of the partisan tide. That is, the complete results of their independent decisionmaking at the ballot box aren’t available until after the election is over.

Once that happens, the uncertainty is over. People can clearly see who’s in power. And if the people are moderate, which they are, when they look at the newly unified government which is highly polarized to their left or right, balancing should look a lot more enticing.

In other words, what I’m arguing is that, if we believe partisan tides happen, we should also believe in balancing. In fact, the low-turnout argument boosts the balancing story, as we’d expect the people who do turn out to be more politically knowledgeable and to better understand the consequences of their choice.

One more thing. In other single-member-district democracies, if I’m not mistaken, special elections (more typically called by-elections) are often seen as a strong signal to the governing party, especially in the negative direction. I think local and regional elections do the same thing for parliamentary democracies.

Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the Georgia Senate run-off by a somewhat surprising margin 57-43% margin over Democrat Jim Martin. . . . there seems to be an emerging pattern of the newly elected president’s party losing in run-off elections. Of course, the closest parallel was in Georgia in 1992 when republican Paul Coverdell beat incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler following Bill Clinton’s presidential victory. . . . Political scientists and economists such as Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal, and Mo Fiorina have offered a “balancing” explanation as to why the new president’s party performs poorly in these special elections and in midterm elections generally. The basic idea is that most voters are more ideological moderate than the two parties and therefore would like to balance them through divided government. . . . in a special or midterm election, voters have a clear opportunity to promote balance by voting against the president’s party.

Isn’t there a simpler explanation? Runoff elections generally have lower turnout than general elections (especially if the general election has the president on the ballot). Lower-turnout elections generally favor Republicans and conservatives. Chambliss won a plurality in the primary election, then you go to a lower-turnout runoff and you’d expect him to do even better, which he did. (Similarly for Republican candidate Coverdell in 1992.)

Is “balancing” really needed to explain this at all?

P.S. I agree with McCarty that the whole 60 votes thing has been overemphasized. Realistically there’s a limit to how many times the minority will want to filibuster against legislation that is popular enough to be passed by a majority in the House and Senate.

The larger lesson here, however, is the power of ideology in explaining voting outcomes. Good thing I’m teaching a class on ideology in the spring!

The notion that political parties are a key determinant of income inequality has been around for a long time. I suspect many non-academics take its truth for granted. Among American scholars, the notion is perhaps most closely associated with Douglas Hibbs . . .

[In his recent book, Unequal Democracy], Larry Bartels suggests that a key part of the story is different policies pursued by Democratic and Republican presidents. . . . Bartels’ argument, while by no means novel, is very much a fresh one. It is based on extensive empirical analysis of the post-World War II period. Is he correct? I think Bartels probably has it right for part of this period, but I’m not convinced that his hypothesis holds up for the other part. . . .

This relates to some ideas I had after seeing Bartels speak on his work at Columbia a couple of years ago; see here and here. In particular, in that last link, I wrote the following:

After seeing Larry Bartels present his findings on how the economy has done better, for the poor and middle class, under Democratic presidents than Republican presidents, I was puzzled. Not that it couldn’t be true, but it seemed a little mysterious, given the general sense that presidents don’t have much control over the econony–business cycles just seem to happen sometime.

Attitudes about what presidents can do for the economy

But the general perceptions about Presidents and the economy have changed over time.

I might be wrong here, not having lived through the entire postwar period, but my perception is that, during most of this time, “competence” was not an issue; rather, there was a general belief that the president could do some things, most notably help labor (for the Democrats) or business (for the Republicans).

The exception here was the 1976-1996 period, during which there was a real sense of economic incompetence or powerlessness of some presidents (Ford with his Whip Inflation Now, Carter with stagflation, the residual view of Democrats being incompetent for the economy, George H.W. Bush with the deficit and the regression, perhaps extending to Dole in 1996). Then, since 2000, we’ve returned to the general attitude that both parties have essential competence but have different goals. (Not that everyone agrees on the “competence” issue, but it seems to me that the battle is more being fought on priorities than competence–in contrast to 1992, for example.)

Back to Larry’s paper

So, the conventional wisdom based on the 1976-1996 period is that presidents can’t do much, they’re at the mercy of the business cycle, etc., which makes Bartels’s results seem like some sort of fluke, or a perhaps meaningless juxtaposition of one-off results. But taking the 1948-1972 and 2000-2004 perspectives, Bartels’s graph makes a lot of sense. From this perspective, the Democrats did their thing, and the Republicans did theirs, and you’d expect to see a big difference at the low end of the income scale. (Again, this is inherently short-term reasoning, not long-term, but as Larry pointed out in his talk, the evidence is that voters are susceptible to short-term inferences.)

In summary: we’re used to thinking of presidents as fairly powerless surfers on the global economy, able to tinker with tax rates but not much more–but thinking about the entire postwar period, there’s certainly been at least the perception that presidents can deliver the economic goods to their constituencies. So from that perspective, Larry’s curves should not be much of a surprise–at least in that the slope for Democrats goes down (i.e., poor people do better under Democratic presidents) and the slope for Republicans goes up (i.e., rich people do better under Republican presidents). The relative positions of the lines is another story, which perhaps corresponds to random alignments of the business cycle.

Perhaps Kenworthy can connect this thinking more directly to his arguments. My time frames don’t quite align with his, but it’s a similar idea of breaking the period into smaller segments.

And, to comment on my comments . . . when posting the above in 2006, I wrote, “since 2000, we’ve returned to the general attitude that both parties have essential competence but have different goals. . . . we’re used to thinking of presidents as fairly powerless surfers on the global economy, able to tinker with tax rates but not much more. . .” Things sure have changed in 2 1/2 years!

Since Blagojevich is still the governor, he still has the right by state law to make the appointment. Remember, Ted Stevens ran for re-election even after being convicted on corruption charges (though he lost, despite being a mythic figure in Alaskan political history). Indeed, the prosecution and trial of Blagojevich is likely to take a long time. And state law imposes no deadline on the appointment, unlike other states. So he could just proclaim his innocence and wait it out. But it is difficult to imagine who would want the job if it meant being appointed by Blagojevich now.

What’s interesting is the role of ideology in the appointment process. My research on state legislative ideology revealed how remarkable Blagojevich was in the context of the Illinois Democratic Party. Given his Congressional and state legislative voting record, he ranks in the more conservative third of his party. See here for more details. (Of course, he’s no Lisa Madigan, who is one of the most conservative Democrats in the party.)

If the Governor resigns or is impeached, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn will be elevated to the governorship and acquire the right to make the appointment. This is potentially consequential because of two factors. First, according to the indictment, Blagojevich was considering nominating himself if others wouldn’t “play ball” and give him or his wife some plums in return for the pick. Given that nobody would be stupid enough to make a deal with a governor that has been under investigation for years, and combine that with a governor crazy enough to believe he could make a run for President in 2016 (!), that self-pick was indeed a possibility.

So Blagojevich’s indictment prevents his elevation of himself (or anyone else), clearing the way for a more liberal pick by Pat Quinn. Quinn does not have a voting record, so we can not (yet) be sure of his ideological leanings. But making the “conservative” prediction that (s)he will be about as liberal as a median Democrat indicates that his pick, if made on ideological grounds, would more conservative than the pick Blagojevich would have made were the choice his.

Doug Hibbs’s model:

(As I wrote a few months ago, “the incumbent party sometimes loses but they never have gotten really slaughtered. In periods of low economic growth, the incumbent party can lose, but a 53-47 margin would be typical; you wouldn’t expect the challenger to get much more than that.”)

The relative positions of the states don’t actually change much from election to election:

You can do slightly better by using polls. As Matthew Yglesias puts it, “the large number of public polls on something like a presidential election makes the outcomes quite easy to forecast based on crude measures. What’s more, even absent polling, Presidential election outcomes seem to be pretty predictable based on nothing more than macroeconomic variables.”

Actually, even the February polls turn out to be pretty good–when combined with previous election results–to pin down the relative positions of the states.

Bayesian combination of state polls and election forecasts

Here’s the revised version of my article with Kari Lock in which we forecast the election using Hibbs for the national popular vote, and a weighted average of last election (corrected for incumbency) and the February polls to get the relative positions of the states.

Lots fo fun stuff there, including this prediction (based on February Clinton-McCain and Obama-McCain polls) of which states Clinton or Obama were expected to win in November:

Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 did well among young voters–like Barack Obama, he was a young Democrat facing older Republican opponents–but not so well as Obama in 2008.

As in many political settings, the largest gains in the graph come from incorporating additional data–in this case, the comparison of 2008 with earlier years, the comparison on young voters with those of other ages, and the comparison of the three other age groups with each other (with the lack of variation in this last comparison being a motivation to focus on trends among young voters in particular).

Difference in McCain vote share, comparing people in each state with family incomes over and under $50,000 (thus, states that are high on this graph are those where richer people were much more Republican than poorer people):

The same graph, but for whites only (following Larry Bartels’s suggestion):

As before, the states are colored as red or blue where McCain or Obama won by more than 10% of the two-party vote, and purple for the states in between.

Lots of interesting patterns here.

What happened in 2008? From the exit poll data at the CNN website, we get:

On the logarithmic scale:

The x-positions of these lines are in different places because Mississippi and Connecticut got small samples and CNN didn’t post the percentages for some of the extreme categories which had small n’s.

Here are three states ranging from Texas (strongly Republican) to Florida (battleground) to California (strongly Democratic). Texas actually has a higher per-capita income than Florida, but here are the exit poll data in any case:

The more systematic thing to do is to look at all 50 states. In each, I took McCain’s share of the two-party vote for each income category where we had data, then regressed it on the category numbers (which we originally numbered 1 through 8 and then standardized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 0.5). I then plotted these regression coefficients on a graph along with state income:

The y-scale of the graph roughly represents McCain’s vote share among the rich minus his share among the poor, within the state. We see the familiar pattern from our book, that the association of rich with Republican holds everywhere but is strongest in poor states. The states are colored as red or blue where McCain or Obama won by more than 10% of the two-party vote, and purple for the states in between.

But there’s a potential problem here, as illustrated by the Mississippi-Connecticut pattern above. The data from Mississippi are more at the low end of income, and the data from Connecticut are more at the high end. We already know that the relation between income and Republican voting flattens out at higher incomes, and so maybe Connecticut’s flat slope arises just because we’re taking its numbers from the flatter part of the curve.

To correct for this, for each state we take the regression plotted above, then we fit the same regression to the same range of incomes from the national exit poll, then we add back in the full regression of the national poll using all eight income categories. The result is a quick estimate of what the entire difference between rich and poor would be in the state, if we were to have sufficient data from all eight income categories within each state.

And here’s the result:

A few of the southern states on the left part of the graph have high rich-poor voting differences (even after controlling for the range of incomes where the comparisons were being made), but the overall pattern of rich and poor states isn’t so strong.

Further thoughts:

1. Larry Bartels comments that if you only look at whites, the rich voter, poor voter pattern is similar in rich and in poor states. So one of our main findings from the Red State, Blue State book from the 2000 and 2004 elections did not persist in 2008.

2. Boy do I want the raw exit poll data so I don’t have to screw around with these artificial missing data problems.

3. I also want some pre-election poll data. The exit polls were so screwed up this year, I don’t fully trust anything based on exit poll data alone.

I had a question for you about the youth vote. What are its ethnic and red/blue composition? The reason I ask is that I was trying to integrate the apparently growing Democratic dominance in this segment with various other beliefs I have seen expressed, e.g

a) that red states have larger fertility (affordable family formation or whatever)

b) that families have an impact on the political beliefs of children (more than educators, as educators insist – at least at the college level, I haven’t really seen a discussion of school teachers) which would then provide a mechanism for (a) to affect voting share to the right of the spectrum

c) that the minorities form a growing share of the young which would tilt the playing field to the left.

My reply:

1. I don’t yet have raw survey data. The exit polls on the web do break down the vote by age and race. Among blacks, Obama won about the same among all age groups. Among Hispanics, Obama did 8% better among the young than the old, and among whites, Obama did 14% better among the young than the old.

But . . . if you believe the exit polls (which I don’t, completely), there was an interaction between age and race: many more of the young voters were ethnic minorities. Among blacks and Hispanics, there were three times as many under-30’s as over-65’s. (By comparison, among whites, there were more old voters than young voters.)

So the age effect partly arose from lots of young ethnic minorities coming out to vote.

2. People do tend to vote like their parents–children of Republicans are, on average, more likely to vote Republican–but cohort effects go on top of this. The recent economy and George W. Bush’s approval ratings aren’t likely to make the Republican Party popular with young people–especially those who are ethnic minorities. Any differences in birth rates between states are small compared to these big political swings, which are not just about Obama; see this graph from 2006:

I [Ben] had this map [see below] on my door for the last week. Based on exactly the same calculation using constant 95% black support and census-proportional representation. The white counties are the ones whose census names didn’t match properly with the names used in the library(maps) package in R, I was too lazy to fix them.

Cool. I’d only suggest using light gray rather than heavy black lines between counties; the map as it is overemphasizes the county borders, I think. But I respect his laziness; there’s always time later to fix the details.

Ben continues:

[Below are] the state-by-state county share plots for the lower 49, Obama vote share as a function of black population share. V.O. Key’s observation that whites who live near blacks in southern states are less positively inclined towards them is *still* visible in several states.

The circle areas are proportional to county voter turnout. (The biggest circle is L.A. county in California, and so forth.)

Ben also had this comment about his map:

It reminded me of something Bob Putnam would say every time someone presented an empirical talk in our Center for the Study of Democratic Politics series during the year he was a fellow here at Princeton: “You should include miles to the Canadian border as a variable in your regression, it is the most important proxy for political culture in America!” At least in the eastern half of the country, he has a point.

Except for New Hampshire and Vermont, I think.

P.S. Further discussion here of graphing possibilities.

I [Teigen] examined contested House races from 2000-2006 to see if candidates’ previous military service helped them garner a higher share of the vote. . . . the effect of being a Democratic veteran or a Republican veteran on vote share, controlling for presidential vote share in the district, gender, incumbency, campaign spending, and other relevant factors. . . .

In general, veteran status has small effects that are not statistically distinguishable from 0. Democratic vets did better than their nonveteran peers in 2002, but did no better in 2006. That election was the year that Joe Sestak, Tammy Duckworth, and others constituted the “Fighting Dems,” a year when you would expect Democratic vets to do well, but instead Republican veterans were helped by a martial past. . . . In 2006 Democratic veterans actually did a little bit worse than Democrats without a service record. This result may have occurred because Democrats were overzealous in their attempts to attract veterans as candidates, leading them to select veterans over higher quality challengers (14% of Democratic challengers were vets in 2002, compared to 28% in 2006). Republican vets running that year performed a little better than nonveteran Republican candidates, as they had been doing in the previous three elections, but the advantage just slipped above statistical significance. Overall, the effect of veteran status is very small.

It would be interesting to see data from other years and comparisons to other occupations (community organizers? small-town mayors? POW’s?).

Teigen continues:

Nevertheless, this does not seem to deter veterans from running for office and promoting their service during their campaign. Despite the allegedly “tinny ring” of military values, some candidates make their military service the key element of their campaign narrative (e.g., Craig Williams). To me, this behavior and the continued emergence of veteran candidacies says that our candidate selection mechanisms still value military service even if the general election yield is inconstant and small.

I actually disagree with this bit, or at least I’m not yet convinced by the evidence. Every candidate has some strength. If you’re a veteran, you can make a big deal about that. If you’re a trial lawyer and won cases for sick kids, you can advertise that. If you’ve been a community organizer, ditto. The lack of any special advantage for veterans does not at all imply that it’s silly for veterans to promote their service during their campaigns.

P.S.

Some technical comments: I don’t think it’s a good idea to control for campaign spending. That’s an intermediate outcome (see, for example, chapter 9).

On the plus side, I agree that it makes sense to analyze House races (larger N than just analyzing presidential contests), and I’m glad to see vote share rather than win/loss used as an outcome.