Normally this blog prefers not to boldly go where the mainstream media have gone before, because they live on another planet with a different prime directive. But sometimes you have to make the trip because the mainstream media are either too busy primping for the cameras to do real research or too blinded by the lights of their own sets to see the real story. So it is with Super Tuesday.
I’m posting this essay before all the results are in because I am that confident in my analysis. This blog had the earliest in-depth takes on both Iowa and New Hampshire and now it is among the first again. So come here if you want not just the earliest, but the most provocative and insightful election coverage.
You probably have heard enough exit polls by now to put you to sleep, data about who voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, data so primitive a college student taking an advanced demographics course could do better. So this blog’s story about Super Tuesday is why those exit polls are wrong–not merely in terms of their accuracy–but wrong in other more disturbing ways.
Let’s start with the accuracy. Exit polls rely on interviews with voters–usually by phone–for their results. Pollsters pick a sample size and depth that mimics the state and sometimes counties or even cities(this is why the networks hate caucuses, because you can’t use exit polls for them as easily). Ever wonder about how those polls are conducted?
This past December the PEW Center interviewed Joe Lenski, co-founder and Executive Vice President of Edison Media Research to get some answers. First, where do you get the pollsters and how are they trained:
Every individual also gets a training video to watch so they will have a training manual, a training video, a training phone call, and then a rehearsal call to make sure they have learned what they need to learn before the entrance poll or exit poll.
So the answer is you, too, can be a pollster. Just send in your application and we will mail you at no extra charge a FREE training video, and guess what else we will add, a FREE training phone call and a rehearsal call all for the incredible salary of ?
As for the accuracy of exit polls, particularly in primary elections, Lenksi finally reveals the secret we all knew anyway:
Exit poll inaccuracy tends to happen in very partisan, very polarized, very active electorate races.
Examples suggest that votes for candidates with more active partisan support could potentially be over-stated in a primary exit poll to the extent that voters who are more politically active, who want their voice heard, are also more likely to respond to an exit poll invitation from our interviewers.
But this is a minor issue compared to the more serious question of whether the polling data presented to the public means anything. In this era of micro-targeting the notion of breaking people down as primitively as the network statisticians prefer gives us the equivalent of a two inch screen when we need a 50 inch high def image. The campaigns now all use cluster analysis to target their messages and organizing. What the ego-trippers spout off on election night about how many women voted for Hillary Clinton is irrelevant to the campaigns. They are looking at particular cluster groups of women.
Now the networks could give us these data by paying better statisticians than they now employ, but you don’t train these people with a video and a sample phone interview. The networks also probably think we are too stupid to understand cluster analysis. But to not use cluster analysis provides a false picture of the campaign–a daguerreotype instead of a video.
Second, the networks use the wrong data. In an America where nonvoters now outnumber voters, candidates win not because of who voted, but who didn’t. The GOP, in particular, has won the White House most of the last quarter century because they were successful in insuring certain people stayed away from the polls while at the same time turning out their own partisans.
Contrary to the myth of the right turn, a minority of Americans have steered the country in that direction. Since the Democrats need to appeal to nonvoters, the more intriguing analysis you will not hear tonight is which candidate–Clinton or Obama–has the most potential for turning out the nonvoter.
Given the primitive data we are working with, figuring out the nonvoters represents an exercise in subtraction. If you know who voted and have the census data for that state, you can construct a somewhat crude image of who did not vote. For Democrats these nonvoters traditionally have been the poor and people of color.
To show how out of it the media have become, public television had Joseph Lowery and John Lewis commenting on the race issue. Now both these old lions are heroes to me, but they are from a different world and a different generation. My guess is that you could do a poll on certain street corners in Philly or DC and no one would have heard of them. As for those nice little focus groups of voters you see on television that look as though they came straight from Central Casting Inc., do you ever see any nonvoters there?
It is as if we had stepped back to the early days of the Republic when well-educated, well-off white men decided who would be President. Thankfully the gender blindness has disappeared, but not the rest. Increasingly our Presidents are being elected by suburbanites. It has been years since I heard either a candidate or the exit poll people speak about what used to be termed the “farm vote” and nobody speaks much about the inner city vote because they don’t go there. Hence all this BS about the middle class.
But if the Democrats are going to win they need to turn out these nonvoters. For example, if people of color turned out for Al Gore and John Kerry like they turned out for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush would not have occupied the White House for eight years.
Unfortunately, exit poll data from Super Tuesday are not optimistic. Hillary Clinton does not seem to be aiming at nonvoters, at least at this stage of the campaign, while Barack Obama’s campaign depends on turning them out. In a soundbite that is the heart of the contest between them.
The four states that control 26% of the delegates are all notorious for their numbers of nonvoters. Clinton’s success depended on her running a Republican-like campaign while Obama could have swept those states if he had captured the nonvoters. But he did not.
There lies the second, semi-exclusive observation of this blog. I say semi-exclusive, because the people in the AfroSpear get it, but the white middle class does not listen to them. Barack Obama will become President only if he can connect with poor and working class people of color. He doesn’t need the limousine liberals of MoveOn, who have managed to screw up everything from Ned Lamont to General You-Know-Who. He does need organizations like ACORN, African American churches, Hip-Hop artists and community groups most white folks do not recognize.
I’ll even tell you the most interesting fact about Super Tuesday and this campaign: has the mainstream press told you anything about where rap artists come down about Obama? Check out some of the raps on YouTube. There is Rem Steele with “Support Barack Obama,” NuFace has put one of my favorite artists, Common’s “The People” with a video about Obama, and, of course, the one everybody knows about “I Got a Crush…On Obama” by Obama Girl, which will even give you a complementary ringtone. The best line from this one is:
You can Barack me tonight
I’ve got a crush on Obama.
As for the artists themselves, Obama has received endorsements from Master P, Common, and Nas. Obama lists the last two on his web site.
Here it’s time for the “r” word, because Obama walks a very fine line with Hip-Hop culture, even among African Americans. Remember Bill Clinton ran against it. In a Chicago interview Obama hit the right notes:
There are a whole series of messages that could be sent to our young people and these rap artists, and Hip-Hop artists, they’re creative enough that they can communicate that message in a way that will appeal to young people, so we just have to tap that creativity.
So the question for Super Tuesday is whether this support is helping to bring out African American nonvoters and whether other nonvoters helped Barack Obama. Let’s focus on three key states, all of which were supposed to go for Hillary Clinton: California, New York and New Jersey. Census data is as follows:
Exit poll data from 2004 show how John Kerry did with these voters. The dataset titles come from CNN data.
The next table shows the exit poll data for Bill Clinton in 1996.
A quick note of explanation: the exit poll data show the percentages of each group among the total VOTERS. It DOES NOT show the percentage of each group that turned out relative to their population. For example, if fewer white voters turn out, but a lot of poverty voters show up their percentage among the total voters might be higher than it is among the actual population.
So what do the tables show? For John Kerry, African Americans voted in enough numbers that their percentage of voters came close to their population percentage, but the percentages of all the other groups were lower. For Bill Clinton, the percentages of people in poverty and with lower education levels comprised a far higher percentage of the total voters. Although the black voting and Hispanic percentages were lower in 1996, Clinton captured a higher percentage than Kerry.
And how did Obama do? In a word–poorly. Here is the CNN exit poll data:
First, his voting percentages among people of color are much closer to John Kerry’s than Bill Clinton’s. More ominously, Obama’s performance among Hispanic voters can only be described as dismal. It not only cost him all three states, but gave Clinton a larger margin of victory than she would have enjoyed had Obama even attracted half the Hispanic vote. You will read it here first: if Obama cannot mend this serious problem, he will not get the nomination and if he does manage to get the nomination his lack of support among Hispanics will cost him the White House.
If you examine the exit poll data from these three states increasingly it appears the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will not hinge on the nonvoters but on the ability of each of them to turn out what looks to be their bases of support: for Clinton, middle-aged and older women; for Obama, young white men. Remember also where you first heard this one.
The other striking statistic that does not bode well is that poor and less educated voters did not turn out for primaries in those states, meaning neither candidate is currently resonating with them. The poverty voting percentages in the Democratic primaries in these three states the Democrats will have to win to win the White House are in some cases half what Bill Clinton turned out in 1996. Not matter whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama captures the nomination, the Democrats have a serious problem on their hands if they cannot turn out these voters.
It hurts to say “I told you so,” but all the talk about the middle class that has come from the Democratic Party over the last few elections looks to have severed them from one of their most important bases. It also is an ominous development for America because if you compare the Census data to the turnout, a significant percentage of low income, less educated Americans now feel no one speaks for them. They truly have become what Franklin Roosevelt once referred to in the language of his time as the “forgotten man.” The Super Tuesday data make you wonder if the Democrats will become the forgotten party?
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