Houston (and Atlanta, and Birmingham, and Little Rock), We Have a Problem

Andrew Gelman:

The whites in the heartland of today's Republican Party just do not vote--and do not think--like the rest of us do. Richard Nixon wanted the Republican Party to lock up the South. Now it looks as though the South has locked up the Republican Party.

What is to be done?

Comments

[james]

Remove all federal bases and agency headquarters out of the south. Move NASA facilities especially out of Texas along with ALL US military bases there. That state has benefited since 11/22/1963 way out of proportion to what it gives back to the rest of the country.

Let's have a REAL Reconstruction instead of the stunted one that Andrew Johnson instituted letting the rebels and traitors back into the government while suffering no consequences whatsoever for their treasonous, criminal acts.

The south never acknowledged that it lost the war and its representatives have ever since been milking the rest of us dry as a sort of reparation for the loss of the slaves all the while throwing up obstacles to effective federalism.

[low-tech cyclist]

"Now it looks as though the South has locked up the Republican Party.

What is to be done?"

Ummm...pop a cork on a good bottle of champagne?

To the extent that the Bible Belt dominates GOP politics, there's only a downward spiral ahead for them. Only epic fail on the Dems' part can stop that.

Meanwhile, it'll be some time before the Dems need a vibrant opposition party to keep them in check, because (as demonstrated yesterday) it'll be some time before Dems stop jumping at the sight of their own shadows. So there's no need to mourn over the demise of the GOP.

[NeilS]

The only region where there are enough African Americans to make the trends significant is in the South.

The lines for the other regions are garbage.

[theo]

NeilS,

Yes, the fit lines outside the South are extrapolated too far, but no matter how you break down the data there's no negative trend there.

The positive trend in the Midwest looks real. I wonder if those are Rust Belt union dominated counties, many of which attracted substantial black populations ~50 years ago. The fact that those counties, many of which aren't doing so well, don't show racially polarized voting is pretty interesting.

[David in NY]

Oh, go back to fretting about marc rich, bmz.

[Palolo lolo]

If I remember correctly,most of the southern states receive more money from the Feds than they
pay in taxes. No more welfare for 'em. Make them pay their own way

[Julio Huato]

"What is to be done?"

Note to Andrew Gelman: Use a log horizontal scale. (Interpreting the log of a percentage is not as straightforward, but the graph will look better.)

[jamzo]

you could also look at these results optimistically

before 1964 there would have been almost no votes other than the white vote

we have been struggling with the differences between the south and the rest of the country since the constitution was written

these differences seem to be getting smaller and smaller and hurting us less and less

while the electoral vote was not what i would want, i do not think it will not look like this in 20 more years

[sd]

The South is the only region of the country where there is a substantial rural black population (Note that on these graphs it is only in the South that there is a significant number of counties where the black population is large as a percent of total population).

Rural populations tend to vote Republican. So it stands to reason that the only part of the country where you find a lot of blacks living in rural counties is also the only part of the country where there is a clear negative correlation between the % of the population that is black and the % of the white population that votes for Obama.

In the Northeast, Midwest and the West Blacks and Whites only live together in cities, and the white people who live in cities tend to be liberal. More conservative whites tend to live in suburbs and smaller towns. So what makes the "effect" implied by this post show up is the fact that the South is actually racially mixed outside of a handful of urban oases, unlike the rest of the country.

But hey, why do the hard work of looking at demographics when you can sit in Berkeley and assert that the white population of a dozen states is eeeevil.

[James Wimberley]

If I increase the font size to something my 62-year-old eyes are comfortable with, the low-value stuff on the right eats up the high-value stuff on the left. Sort of like the American South.

[wcw]

Nice little fiction there, sd. Thing is, the data do not back you up: see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/11/estimates_votes.html and its state-by-state plot of counties with circle size proportional to votes at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/ben2.png

It ain't rural-vs-urban, it's southern-vs-not southern.

Thanks for playing, though.

[albrt]

"Only epic fail on the Dems' part can stop that"

One epic fail, coming up! Would you like a side of Lieberman with that?

[chris]

Wean the southern Republicans off the Fed Govt teat. There are better places to spend the money.

As an aside that clown Lieberman snarled and the democratic senators jumped a mile. Or is there a millionaires club interpretation of what went down.

[Ken Houghton]

chris - The Dem Sens needed to put the bloggers in their place. (See, for parallel, the scene in F-911 where Jon Corzine and other Senators are gayly laughing as citizens and House members attempt to get them to take seriously a challenge to the 2000 election "results.")

Unfortunately, since my new voting model is going to be "Vote Republican; they admit they will f*** you with the Consent of the King--not your own," I suspect the possibility of it becoming a meme is low.

[derrida derider]

See, y'all should have just let the South secede. If you think the US is rich now imagine what it would be like without that deadweight.

There'd probably be a NAFTA deal negotiated with the Dixie Economic Community sometime about now (it would be cheaper, of course, than the huge amounts of development aid provided in recent decades or those military interventions to suppress communist revolutions led by their black majority).

[Barry]

"If I increase the font size to something my 62-year-old eyes are comfortable with, the low-value stuff on the right eats up the high-value stuff on the left. Sort of like the American South."

Posted by: James Wimberley

I second that, and I'm 48.

Brad, most of the redesign has hurt the layout, IMHO.

[sd]

wcw and sloppsd:

Your links don't tell the story you want them to tell. Yes, the south is redder than any other area of the country. That's not exactly a secret. But the rural counties are still redder than the urban counties in every part of the country.

The state-level scatter plots below the map suffer from the same drawbacks as the regional scatterplots in this post.

And surely - surely - you can't deny that the south has the highest proportion of rural blacks by far of any region of the country. I mean - just look at the charts above. In each of the 4, what % of the ots are to the right of 10% on the x-axis? Its not even close.

So again - given that rural white voters are more conservative than urban white voters in every part of the country, and given that blacks are a larger % of the rural population in the south than anywhere else in the country - how can you dismiss the hypothesis that the negative slope on the line for the south above is an artifact of the differences in the urban/rural distribution of population rather than an indicator that white southerners are largely racists?

And sloppysd: its really rich to be accused of over-generalizing for poitning out the serious methodological flaws in an "analysis" that was trumpeted as evidence that the political party that draws roughly 50% of Americans voters over time is somehow dismissable as racist to the core.

[Frank Dean]

Irrespective of what these graphs mean or don't mean, what sort of ignoramus would advocate punishing the South? If you care about the welfare of black Americans, why would you want to withdraw federal funds from the area of the country most of them live?

[christofay]

Does the fed largess flow through to southern blacks? NASA in Houston is a white engineer management enclave for example, I'm guessing. When I went to a small conservative college in western Virginia in the 1970s everyone was from some "country day" school. Later I realized these were white flight schools where the locals decided to fund a parallel private school system rather than create one well-funded public school system open to all.

[Robert Waldmann]

Note that the non South estimates are dominated by a few counties which are clearly big Cities.

I think that to be fair to the South, you have to include something on Urban, Suburban, Exurban and Rural. Is it Southern Whites who are around Blacks vote for the White guy or Rural & exurban Whites who are around Blacks ?

Of course I'm sure that Whites in the South are more racist than Whites in the rest of the country and that the Pope is Catholic.

[christofay]

What about the Bears, where do they go?

And why the heck are the Patriots in the Peoples Republic of the Insolvent State of Massachusetts?

In all, these are strange times when a Republican candidate for president on one hand touts his management service as governor and on the other runs against the Peoples' Republic he used to be a governor of.

[christofay]

While you are trying to address a touchy political problem here, wouldn't this be part of a potential great line for a rock or a rap song:

Houston and Atlanta and Birmingham and Little Rock

Sort of doing for the South what Che Springsteen does for Jersey?

One of those gather up your troubles while we stand together anthems.

[Michael Turner]

"What is to be done?"

The GOP is still running the country, right? Until Jan 20th? And the GOP's base is now clearly the old Confederacy, right? So the country is basically the Confederate States of America, for the next two months.

So maybe there's still time for the Union to secede from the Confederacy! I say we get to keep all strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, and they can have all our ballistic missile defense stuff. That would be fair, wouldn't it?

[The Raven]

"Now it looks as though the South has locked up the Republican Party. What is to be done?"

Caw! Get the south to throw away the key! Single-party states are usually good for corvids!

[james]

Gee, I don't see too much of that federal largesse trickling down to the blacks down south. There are STILL tarpaper shacks along Route 13 and 113 through Virginia and Maryland and there are worse structures along old route 17 through North and South Carolina.

It's people like Trent Lott, Saxby Chambliss, Ralph Reed, and the Bush family who benefit from the federal dollars that arrive by the truckful in the south.

[AIMAI]

The south has locked up the republican party? what a great line. Does that make the "southern strategy" the montezuma's revenge of politics? I like to think so. And I agree with the others. This typeface and layout are hurting my aged eyes.

aimai

[Quaker in a Basement]

Check out these maps over at the Prometheus 6 blog:

http://www.prometheus6.org/node/23224

The maps illustrate a stunning correlation between counties in the south that went for Obama and cotton production.

That is, cotton production in 1860.

[selenesmom]

"In the Northeast, Midwest and the West Blacks and Whites only live together in cities"

Can we please get some evidence here? I live in a suburb of Portland, Oregon and it's more diverse ethnically than most of Portland itself (with the exception of the historically African-American neighborhoods in Portland, which now have gotten a lot of white inflight).

What is best about our neighborhood is that the kids play together in mixed-race groups. All the kids seem to have friends of various races. This bodes well for the future. When I grew up there were something like 10-20 black kids bused to our neighborhood school and they all played in their own group.

[ryan]

What's to be done?

Bottom line is there are too many of us bouncing around with two few Senate seats up here. Let's take a page from the Libertarians, or from Adelbert Ames, and colonize Mississippi. 165,000 votes wins the state for Obama and Musgrove. Mobile Bay is gorgeous, and it was a tremendous northern victory in the Civil War. Any takers?

[Tom Maguire]

Why pick on Obama and blacks? I will bet without any research at all that the graphs for Bush-Kerry were very similar. I suspect Bush-Gore looks similar as well, although Al may have had some modest residual southern appeal given his TN roots.

I have no doubt that long-time racial antagonism is part of the explanation. But southerners also show a marked regional aversion to unions and a preference for the military. What is to be done?

[Neal]

Tom Maguire:

Unions were a force for desegregation from their beginning. The military was segregated past the end of WW2, long after the bases were located in the south. Coincident or not?