Untangling “Voter Ownership” and the Champions of Big Ideas

by · May 9, 2018

AdotSad

AdotSad is a coastal elite living in the California bubble of Orange County. He’s a pharmacist by day and a time waster by night. He is on Twitter.

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52 Responses

  1. LTL FTC says:
    May 9, 2018 at 11:31 am

    Good article. Good balance.

    The black vote is in the terrible position of being necessary, but not sufficient for Democrats, which makes them exceedingly cheap dates, politically speaking. Just let them continue voting, for starters.

    Remember the fawning, treacly torrent of overpraise for black women following the Alabama senate election? Turns out that black women voted like they always do, but the partisan swing between ‘17 and the usual results in AL came overwhelmingly from white women. It seems clear that a future politician hoping to be the next Doug Jones will have to pin his hopes on those hated Beckys. That means that stuff like criminal justice reform will remain firmly on the back burner.

    OTOH the lip-service to #blackgirlmagic or “strong black women saving us” will continue. Despite political realities, as that’s the territory of white feminist writers who are terrified of a Twitter dragging for crediting the Beckys’ change of heart or seeing it as the basis for a larger partisan re-alignment. The internet is weird like that.Report

  2. Jaybird says:
    May 9, 2018 at 12:14 pm

    Say what you will about Dave Rubin but “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Trump has more black supporters than Conan and Kimmel combined” was pretty gosh darn funny.

    Anyway, have you read John Judis and Ruy Teixiera’s “The Emerging Democratic Majority“? If you haven’t, it’s a 2002 book that talks about how the general demographic shift in the country is going to work out to the benefit of the Democrats.

    Here’s a fun article from 2012 when they look at the thesis of the book 10 years on.

    Oh, how bright was the future then!

    Anyway, when it comes to the African-American vote I keep musing about this government report from way back when… I mean, we don’t want the African-American vote to start seeing “Immigration” as their #1 issue. It doesn’t strike me as likely that they’re going to be standing in solidarity with refugees and Hispanics who just want to make a better life for themselves and their families.

    For that matter, a disproportionate number of Hispanics don’t identify as sufficiently members of a minority to vote for Democrats. (Perhaps we can call them “White Hispanics”? Just throwing that out there.) The 2016 numbers were good for Democrats (but not *QUITE* good enough).

    Anyway, the last thing in the world the Democrats need is African-American voters asking “What have you done for me *LATELY*?” Or, crap, any group that gets swept into a “(whatever) vote” grouping. If it does, the 2022 article talking about the Emerging Democratic Majority Turns 20 won’t be sunny at all.Report

    • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:
      May 9, 2018 at 1:08 pm

      “Say what you will about Dave Rubin but “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Trump has more black supporters than Conan and Kimmel combined” was pretty gosh darn funny.”

      Funny, maybe… but any basis in truth? I wonder if there are numbers…Report

    • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:
      May 9, 2018 at 2:54 pm

      Yeah, here’s the thing about immigration – the biggest opponents to Trump’s immigration plans are wait for it…African Americans

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/04/12/the-one-group-that-opposes-trumps-border-wall-more-than-latinos/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6668fc96998c

      No ethnic group opposes the border wall more than black Americans, according to the Quinnipiac poll. Nearly 9 in 10 — 87 percent — of black voters oppose the wall, compared with 71 percent of Latino voters and 51 percent of white voters.

      According to the Quinnipiac poll, 70 percent of black Americans said they do not believe that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from Americans.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:
        May 9, 2018 at 4:47 pm

        Unfortunately, I couldn’t read that article.

        So I was stuck with Google. Here’s what I was able to Google:

        NPR ran a story on what the polls do (and don’t) say and they pointed out that many of the recent polling numbers that Trumpistas were Trumpeting on the Sunday shows were worded poorly… like one question asked “Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders?”

        And since 80% of people went with the latter, Trumpistas were yelling that people supported shutting down the borders.

        NPR points out that no no mainstream political leaders are proposing open borders.

        The story itself points to some interesting polls.

        It pointed to a Harvard Harris poll (warning: pdf) that pointed out that 79% of people preferred “merit-based” immigration. The interesting question was not that one, though. I thought the interesting question was this one (you can find it on page 68 and look at it yourself):

        IM5 In your opinion, about how many legal immigrants should be admitted to the U.S. each year?

        The answers went:
        None
        1 to less than 250,000
        250,000 to 499,999
        500,000 to less than 1 million
        1 million to less than 1.5 million
        1.5 million to less than 2 million
        2 million to less than 2.5 million
        2.5 million or more

        When you look at the columns for “who voted for what” under “ethnicity”, they have White, Hispanic, Black/AA, and Other.

        First, let’s look at the numbers for None. Whites had 11%, Hispanics had 3%, Black/AA had 6%, and Other had 4%.

        Look and see who had the top numbers for “1 to less than 250,000”.

        The number for White was 35%. The number for Hispanic was 30%. The number for Other was 29%.

        Guess what the number was for Black/AA. Here, I’ll tell you: 48%.

        So let’s add up those numbers together. For somewhere between “No Immigration” and “only 250,000/year”, White people supported that low, low number at a rate of 46%. Hispanics at a rate of 33%. Other at a rate of 33%.

        And Black/AA at a rate of 54%.

        As NPR points out:

        It’s hard to know how to interpret the results of that question without the context of current immigration levels. As of 2016, the U.S. accepted nearly 1.2 million new legal permanent residents, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Of those, just over half were new arrivals. The rest of people received changes in status — for example, some might have been refugees who became legal permanent residents.

        Half of 1.2 million is somewhere around 600,000.

        And more than half of “Black/AA” think that an appropriate amount of immigration is somewhere between 0 and 250,000.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:
          May 9, 2018 at 5:04 pm

          I always find it interesting when ‘What should this number be?’ is polled without any indication of the current numbers.

          You tend to get some very different results vs. what happens when people are looking at the actual numbers.

          It’s entirely possible that some of those 54% of black people think immigration needs to be reduced from two million a year to 250,000…and others think it should be increased from 100,000 a year to 200,000.

          I’m not trying to make a point here, or argue what’s really going on…I’m just saying that people are pretty crappy at guessing what is currently happening, so when you just hand them numbers without context, they sorta just select one.

          Now, you can sorta get some context from the fact that 54% of black people picked the ‘lowest that is not zero’ option, which does imply they do not want ‘a lot’ of immigration, or that they want ‘less’ immigration. But it’s pretty hard to guess how much less compared to now, because we don’t know how much they think there _is_.

          I wish they would poll with something like that explainer paragraph that NPR had before the question, and asked what amount it should be changed to, with responses like ‘none at all, ~25%, ~50%, ~100%, ~150%, etc’.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:
            May 9, 2018 at 6:07 pm

            Well, I always assume that the poll questions that are obvious proxies for other questions will be answered as if they were the other question rather than the question asked.

            That is, “M2 In general, do you think the American economy is on right track or
            is it off on the wrong track?” question will be answered as if it was “Do you support Trump, you jerk?”

            But I assume that questions that are not obvious proxies are answered as if they were the question asked.

            “I4 Would you say that your personal financial situation is improving or getting worse?”

            While this question might be a proxy for “Do you support Trump, you jerk?” (let’s face it, if the numbers are good, Trump’s going to use it as one), it’s not an *OBVIOUS* proxy.Report

            • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:
              May 9, 2018 at 10:36 pm

              If we’re going to create a realistic model of how people react to proxy questions, you need to give the realistic answers:

              A. I would say anything no matter how absurd or offensive to display my anger.
              B. I’m somewhat opposed.
              C. I’m somewhat favorable.
              D. I would be willing to click on literally anything if it allowed me to express my maniacal support.
              E, not sure / not applicable / hurry up and get to the meaner ones.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:
              May 10, 2018 at 12:00 am

              I was just trying to make the point the poll is really sorta saying ‘54% of black people think that the amount of immigration should be the smallest option without it being totally barred’, not ‘54% of black people really have an solid opinion on the specific number of immigrations that should be allowed’.

              So your point is right, I was just suggesting the specific numbers were pretty random…that poll probably could have been done with all the numbers multipled by three, or divided by three, and you’d basically get _exactly_ the same percentages, because people aren’t picking numbers, they are mostly picking ‘how much immigration should there be on a scale of 0 to 7’.

              A small majority of black people are a solid ‘1’, and that is an important thing to know.

              It is also relevant to notice that everyone basically picked 1-3, as in, everyone thinks immigration is too high. Not because the actual numbers they picked are lower than they currently are (Although they are), but instead because they picked the low end of numbers.

              But I assume that questions that are not obvious proxies are answered as if they were the question asked.

              At this point, I’m not sure there are a lot of questions on any political poll that _aren’t_ proxy question anymore.

              I mean, take the wall question, the original thing being talked about: ‘The Wall’ is not a real thing. There is a border fence that has been up for a while, and it occassionally gets more or les funding and becomes larger or smaller. There never will be a 100% barrier the entire length of the country, and there never will be no barrier.

              And thus anyone expressing support for it, or opposing it, is really just taking a political position about how the government should be acting towards illegal immigrants.

              Now, with these two pieces of information, that a slight majority of black people want immigration low, and that a vast majority do not want the wall, we get what looks like some sort of conflict, but…is it?

              I mean, I don’t know. Here’s a totally random guess: Perhaps the ~40% of black voters that do not want a wall, but do want legal immigration low, actually have a problem with ICE harrassing illegal immigrants, and are treating Trump’s Wall as a proxy for that?

              Or maybe they just see Trump’s wall as a proxy for Trump _himself_ and dislike Trump himself for quite understandable reasons like Trump saying a lot of racist things.

              Both of those things would imply that the Republican party could collect some black voters on immigration..but only if they could somehow restrain their nativistist ‘punish illlegal immigrants!’ base and/or reject Trump.

              That is, if my guess is correct in that one or both of those things is what they do not like about ‘The Wall’. I have no idea.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:
                May 10, 2018 at 12:08 am

                I have no idea.

                Oh, neither do I. But I do know that all of the questions are, to some extent, proxy questions but the ones that are less obviously proxy questions will tend to reflect accuracy to a better degree than the ones that are obvious ones.

                If the answer to “how much immigration do you think is good?” is “as little as possible without it being none at all” for the African-American vote, then that tells me a lot more about how the African-American vote feels about immigration than, say, the wall question. Because the wall question is, obviously, “do you want Trump to get a political win?”Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 1:17 pm

                If the answer to “how much immigration do you think is good?” is “as little as possible without it being none at all” for the African-American vote, then that tells me a lot more about how the African-American vote feels about immigration than, say, the wall question.

                OTOH, to get to the original discussion instead of me nitpicking what the polling tells us…the fact they’re willing to completely and utterly throw immigration, supposedly a very important issue for them, under the bus when it comes to giving Republicans a win also tells us something. 😉

                I mean, I think there’s a valid point that in some hypothetical universe where significant amounts of black people were willing to vote for Republicans, Republican’s position on immigration could tempt them into switching parties. But we don’t really seem to live in that universe.

                And I’m not sure it’s policy positions (which the Republicans could hypothetically change) which is stopping black voters. It seems more decades of baggage that continue to accrue until very recently…and then Trump.

                Or to put it another way: I believe black voters might shift to Republican because of immigration when I see them shift in any amount _at all_ to Republicans. (A shift that isn’t just undoing the Obama shift, before people get excited and start pointing at the small increase under Trump. Something like half the black Republicans defected to Obama, and then came back for Trump. That is not an actual shift in voting patterns.)

                And I am suddenly remembering when exactly this same thing was supposed to happen two decades ago due to black voters being wary about gay rights, and Republicans were going swoop in and steal them with that policy position.Report

              • Alan Scott in reply to DavidTC says:
                May 10, 2018 at 3:25 pm

                I think we’re kind of avoiding the elephant in the room when it comes to proxies.

                I strongly suspect that most Black Americans view GOP positions on immigration as a proxy for GOP positions on people of color in general, and respond accordingly.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:
                May 10, 2018 at 4:14 pm

                the fact they’re willing to completely and utterly throw immigration, supposedly a very important issue for them, under the bus when it comes to giving Republicans a win also tells us something.

                Another very, very good point.

                But if the African-American vote merely regresses to the mean that was found in 1988, I imagine that the Democrats are going to find themselves in hot water in a lot of places where they thought they wouldn’t be.

                And, to repeat what I said in my root comment:
                Anyway, the last thing in the world the Democrats need is African-American voters asking “What have you done for me *LATELY*?” Or, crap, any group that gets swept into a “(whatever) vote” grouping. If it does, the 2022 article talking about the Emerging Democratic Majority Turns 20 won’t be sunny at all.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 4:21 pm

                Just out of curiosity… what’s the last thing in the world the GOP needs?Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Kazzy says:
                May 10, 2018 at 4:23 pm

                Donald TrumpReport

              • Kolohe in reply to Marchmaine says:
                May 10, 2018 at 4:54 pm

                Though it would be something if that’s the last thing in the world the GOP got.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kolohe says:
                May 10, 2018 at 5:02 pm

                I honestly suspect that the GOP is in some form of metamorphosis now that it would not be in had Jeb! lost to Clinton.

                Remember Dan Scotto’s “Value Over Replacement-Level Republican President” essay?

                My criticism of his essay was that it leads us to the weird conclusion that the Republicans would be better off if Hillary had won.

                Now we’re in a weird place where I’m wondering if the Republicans would be metamorphosing had lost. (2018 elections would look hella different, for one thing.)Report

              • Marchmaine in reply to Kolohe says:
                May 10, 2018 at 5:21 pm

                I think both of you are right… the odd thing vis-a-vis the OP is that in this case, a constituency slipped their owners, but didn’t switch parties… they took over the Business.

                I’m still watching the owners… 2018 will give us an inkling of whither the owners are going in 2020.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:
                May 10, 2018 at 4:45 pm

                Marchmaine nailed it.

                Though, ironically enough, if you had asked me that in 2015, my answer would have been “Jeb!”Report

              • pillsy in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 6:27 pm

                Sometimes (usually?) you’re better off not resolving the contradictions at the heart of your political contradictions.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to pillsy says:
                May 10, 2018 at 8:19 pm

                I just wanted to say that this is a very good comment.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Kazzy says:
                May 10, 2018 at 7:51 pm

                what’s the last thing in the world the GOP needs?

                Actually outlawing abortion or Implementing North Korean style isolation and trade.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 11:53 pm

                And, to repeat what I said in my root comment:
                Anyway, the last thing in the world the Democrats need is African-American voters asking “What have you done for me *LATELY*?”

                Yeah, I don’t agree with this as any sort of danger.

                Firstly, there’s an obvious answer to for Democrats: Well, we gave you Obamacare, something which helped anyone with low income, and would have helped better had Republicans not sabotaged the Medicaid expansion. And the Republicans have kept us from doing anything since.

                Additional things: We protected Medicaid from stupid Republican plans.

                And: We are not going to appoint people like Jeff Sessions to the cabinet.

                But perhaps a better point to be made is that, as far as I can tell, the voting public _never_ asks ‘What did you do for me lately’. They always instead are enthralled by promise about what the candidates are going to do once elected.

                And the Democrats have much, much better answers to that. A whole bunch of answers.

                And, thanks to the Democrats not being in full control of the government since 2008, they can actually explain why they _haven’t_ done those things yet, and point to what they did (Obamacare) when they _did_ have control as evidence they are serious.

                If anyone ever bothers to ask. Which they won’t. Because politics utterly refuses to operate backward, and we take ludicrous promises that individual politicians make about what will happen in the futures thanks to their amazing policies as some serious thing.

                Just once I want some candidate to promise ‘I have an amazing plan to do X’ and the opposing candidate say ‘Hey, that sounds good. I assume if you lose you’ll, like, tell other people in your party this plan? Or tell me? Or will you keep it secret to punish everyone if you don’t get elected?’

                But this pretends that electoral politics has anything to with reality in any manner at all. When in reality we’re all in some sort of Kayfabe pretending that individual elected officials somehow ‘do things’.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:
                May 10, 2018 at 11:55 pm

                Golly. You’d think that Hillary would have won in a landslide because the Black/AA vote showed up in droves.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 11, 2018 at 3:09 pm

                So your theory is that black people were happier with ‘What Democrats did for them lately’ in 2008 than in 2016?

                Also, confusingly, they were happier about what Democrats did for them by 2004 than 2000? What did Democrats do for black people between 2000-2004?

                If you look at both black turnout and black percentages over time, it’s almost impossible to make any sort of logical claim that black voters (Or any voters) have any sort of care about ‘What politicians didn’t do for them’. There is nothing to justify that at all.

                Black turnout has hovered at 60% since 1992. 5% ran off Bill Clinton’s second term, probably because of his welfare reform, and then came back to ~60% to vote against Bush, and then another 5% extra showed up for Obama, and then wandered off again and turnout went back to ~60% against Trump.

                And there’s even less variation in the actual vote, where 85%-90% of black voters voting Democratic….with, again, some addition for Obama, or maybe it’s just all the new voters voted for him.

                There’s not any pattern there, heck, there’s little evidence black voters are willing to punish the Democrats for anything at all, even if they will specifically punish Bill Clinton.

                —

                Again, I repeat my claim that basically, no one has any sort of memory for people ‘not doing helpful things in the past’ when voting.

                They can have a memory of broken promises (Although honestly I’m unsure of that!) or non-helpful things that person or party actually did do, but basically no voter has ever said ‘They didn’t pass or even propose any sort of bill to deal with predatory payday lenders! They have completely ignored the issue and didn’t even bring it up! I shall no longer vote for them!’

                Voters weigh future alternatives, they do not ‘punish’ people for basic inaction. Voting against an action, maybe, total inaction, no.

                Where the confusion arises is when opponents show up and say ‘Payday lenders are predatory, and my opponent has done nothing about them! But I will.’

                But that’s not walking away from someone because they didn’t do anything, it’s walking towards someone who says they will do it better.

                And hence it only matters if there actually is someone a) pointing this out, who b) has some sort of plausible alternative, and c) are not assumed to be harmful in general towards the voter.

                I’m not sure that the Republicans can manage…any of those things with the vast majority of black voters.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:
          May 9, 2018 at 6:32 pm

          Asking specific number based questions is usually terrible polling, since most people don’t know the actual numbers. Polling actual numbers is how you get right-wingers crowing that people polled want a 20% tax rate, while those same people polled want rich people to pay more taxes. So, before you ask the immigration question, I’d ask them the following questions, then give the actual answers.

          1.) How many people live in the US (I’m serious about this)
          2.) What percentage of the population do you think are foreign born (This is important – as again, people are terrible at it. https://www.theguardian.com/society/datablog/2016/dec/13/europeans-massively-overestimate-muslim-population-poll-shows – People think 15%-ish of the population is Muslim when in reality, it’s less than 5%.)
          3.) How many immigrants do you think we currently allow?

          Put all that together, then say, “considering the current US population is 350 million, our current foreign born percentage is 15% according to the latest census, and we allow 1.2 million immigrants per year…” and then you can ask the more complicated question.

          Unless you’re willing to do that, the more/less/same question actually comes closer to reality. It consistently polls that about 30% want less, 40% want about the same, 20% want more, and 10% don’t know or have no opinion.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:
            May 9, 2018 at 6:41 pm

            So we’re willing to throw out polls because people don’t know what they’re talking about?

            I’m down. (As I said, I figure they’re just using the questions as proxies for other questions, if they’re obvious proxies.)

            But, at that point, I’m back to musing about the government report and how we don’t want the African-American vote to start seeing “Immigration” as their #1 issue.

            The last thing in the world the Democrats need is African-American voters asking “What have you done for me *LATELY*?” Or, crap, any group that gets swept into a “(whatever) vote” grouping. If it does, the 2022 article talking about the Emerging Democratic Majority Turns 20 won’t be sunny at all.Report

            • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:
              May 9, 2018 at 7:14 pm

              Do you have an issue with the methodology of the poll Jesse cited? Or just the results?Report

              • Maribou in reply to Kazzy says:
                May 9, 2018 at 7:20 pm

                Given that Jesse cited something behind a paywall it’s pretty hard to do more than speculate about the methodology.

                I don’t think this really redounds to the credit of the methodology though.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Kazzy says:
                May 9, 2018 at 7:22 pm

                I couldn’t *READ* it. I must have gone over my quota for the WaPo this month.

                As I said, I was stuck looking for other polls because Jesse’s link didn’t work for me.

                I provided links to the polls that I could read and to the articles that showed me those polls.

                So it’s not that I had a problem with those polls, it’s just that those polls were in a black box that I could not see, so I was stuck left to my own devices finding articles that talked about this sort of thing and polls that also talked about this sort of thing.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 9, 2018 at 8:08 pm

                Here’s a link to the Q poll – https://poll.qu.edu/search-releases/search-results/release-detail?ReleaseID=2535&What=&strArea=6;0;&strTime=0Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jesse says:
                May 9, 2018 at 8:15 pm

                I appreciate that. Thank you!

                I’ll check it out when I get back from the gym.

                But here’s the question that I thought was most interesting just doing a quick scan down on the page:

                20. Do you think that undocumented immigrants illegally crossing the border with Mexico is an important problem, or not?

                Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 12:05 am

                I went through it and was mostly struck by how many “proxy” questions there were.

                That said, I was surprised to see the state of the nation’s economy numbers doing somewhat well (the excellent/goods being over 50 for a while and 60 or over since November) while, at the same time, the “how are you doing *PERSONALLY*” numbers have been over 70 since the middle of last year.

                (Based off of nothing but my gut feeling, polls that say “the country is doing good, but I’m doing *GREAT!* are better indicators than polls that say vice-versa.)

                And the gun stuff doesn’t interest me and the cop stuff doesn’t interest me today (maybe tomorrow).Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Jaybird says:
                May 10, 2018 at 1:40 am

                “It doesn’t strike me as likely that they’re going to be standing in solidarity with refugees and Hispanics who just want to make a better life for themselves and their families.”

                Does this still strike you as unlikely?Report

  3. pillsy says:
    May 9, 2018 at 1:19 pm

    I think I mentioned it on Twitter, but Maajid Nawaz complaining about other people being hyper-sensitive and censorious is pretty funny.Report

  4. Rufus F. says:
    May 9, 2018 at 2:01 pm

    This is all good observation. I might suggest that the reason some of these Republican commentators get into the hyperbolic claims is that there really are Republicans who imagine them to be true. The Republican friends I still know from the states can get really into the weeds with psychoanalyzing liberals. They hate the individual and want black people to abort their babies and hate freedom and decency and all of that blather. At a certain point, it sounds like listening to someone who’s still obsessed with an ex.Report

    • pillsy in reply to Rufus F. says:
      May 9, 2018 at 2:31 pm

      I might suggest that the reason some of these Republican commentators get into the hyperbolic claims is that there really are Republicans who imagine them to be true.

      This suggests that those people are the real target audience for the claims. One generally preaches theories of false consciousness to the choir, rather than the unconverted.Report

  5. DavidTC says:
    May 9, 2018 at 2:46 pm

    35% of all abortions come from 6% of the population: black women.

    BTW, without me even doing the slightest bit of research, I can tell this is a blatant attempt to ‘lie with statistics’.

    100% of all abortions can only come from 50% of the population, by definition, because only 50% of the population has the equipment to allow an abortion to happen.

    And anything that compares two percentages without bothering to mention that one number is ‘100%-based’ and the other is ‘50%-based’ is a blatant lie via statistics.

    And, yes, I am aware that the correct number is still disproportionately tilted towards black women, my point is that either the person who quoted that stat is either a) a moron, or b) a dishonest liar.

    …and now that I have written that, I went and checked _just in case_ they got the numbers ‘correct’ and just said it wrongly. Nope. Approximately 35% of abortions are by black women, and as black people are approximately 12% of the population (The correct thing to compare that 35% to), black women are presumably approximately 6%.Report

    • Troublesome Frog in reply to DavidTC says:
      May 9, 2018 at 10:42 pm

      It’s also worth noting that the age distributions of the different groups aren’t the same. The percentage of women of child bearing age vs the total population is probably pretty skewed by that big bump of white women over 42.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Troublesome Frog says:
        May 10, 2018 at 1:38 pm

        Yes, but that at least would make a ‘misleading’ stat, instead of just outright lying by comparing 100% to 50%.

        So, anyway, let’s see how much that adds:

        While I don’t have time to find the actual statistics by ‘childbearing age’, a quick look at the generations informs me that black people are 21% of Gen X (Which is already halfway off the childbearing age), and 26% of millennials.

        So the real number is probably somewhere around 24%, assuming that the older end of Gen X is the whiter end. So…uh, it also doubles the number. Wow.

        People running around asserting ‘Black people of childbearing age are only 24% of the population but have 35% of the abortions’ presumably wouldn’t play that well.

        I know this seems utterly irrelevant to the discussion here, and it basically is, but I wish people were more willing to just flat out call people liars for citing statistics like this.Report

  6. Pinky says:
    May 9, 2018 at 2:58 pm

    “Nobody sane thinks Democrats…[are] in favor of abortion in order to keep the black population down.”

    Wow, I think you’re way off on this.Report

    • Maribou in reply to Pinky says:
      May 9, 2018 at 5:32 pm

      Living in a pretty red part of the country, I can attest that a lot of sane people sincerely believe this. Unfortunately, sanity and having a really unreasonable belief* or 70 are perfectly compatible. If mental illness was the only reason why people thought such things, life would be a lot easier and less antagonistic for everybody. And as a mentally ill person I get a little tired of “nobody SANE” arguments, for sure. Not tired enough to censor our writers, obvs. Just, meh. I don’t like them.

      *see moderator commentReport

      • Maribou, Moderator in reply to Maribou says:
        May 9, 2018 at 5:34 pm

        As the moderator, I am going to draw a line and say: please do NOT start an argument, folks, about whether “Democrats”, framed that broadly, actually want this. please don’t. the suspendhammer will probably end up flying freely. If you want to argue about whether some specific Democratic politicians/party officials/factions/nutjobs want that, that’s fine and there are ways to do it civilly. But I can’t deal with the whole “Democrats are the REAL racists” argument today, or with its equally dramatic counter-arguments about Republicans, libertarians, or whomever else it doesn’t make sense to generalize about that broadly. It’s not productive and it doesn’t really contribute to the conversation.

        Can’t. Won’t.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Maribou says:
        May 9, 2018 at 7:02 pm

        “Nobody sane believes X” is a decent shorthand for “No one who’s well-informed about X and uses logic and evidence rather than prejudice and emotion to form their opinions on it believes that.” Like, the truth of “Nobody sane thinks Jews run the world” does not depend on whether Farrakhan needs to be institutionalized (though I am going to bring that up at the next Elders meeting.)Report

        • Maribou in reply to Mike Schilling says:
          May 9, 2018 at 7:08 pm

          @mike-schilling I understand what it’s meant to be shorthand for. (I’m crazy, not stupid.) I think it’s an unwise conflation to make, for a few different reasons, nonetheless. One could say “Nobody rationally believes X” or “Nobody reasonably believes X” nearly as easily, and the historical reasons why we say “Nobody sane believes X” instead are pretty murky and unpleasant, regardless of what angle you look at it from.Report

  7. Mike Schilling says:
    May 9, 2018 at 7:03 pm

    Isn’t David Rubin a charter member of the Intellectual Dark Web? I’m very impressed.Report

  8. Michael Drew says:
    May 10, 2018 at 12:00 am

    This is a really good explanation of the reasons the different groups have migrated in overwhelming numbers to their various parties (in this case, cultural and racial minorities and immigrants to Democrats).

    But the issue here is really about the stragglers and outliers. I’m not sure you ever quite come back around to addressing the “ownership” question per se. Yes, there is reason for minorities to feel like other minorities ought not to support the GOP or Trump. But the question here is, to what extent should they view their role to be to try to enforce such voting? To what extent are they in fact acting like they “own” the voting patterns of their social group? (I would certainly listen to a critique of those saying that they are acting that way that says that that is a gross exaggeration?) To what extent and in what forms is such enforcement justified? To what extent and when do outliers have a legitimate grievance for being treated as though they are breaking a legitimate community expectation or requirement by not voting correctly?

    These are the questions that define whether this ownership attitude really exists. The conservatives advancing the view that it does and it’s wrong may not acknowledge that there are good reasons that the majorities of the minority groups have moved as groups to a particular party, but most of the rest of us do. What’s in question is what are the parameters of legitimate expectations and enforcement on the minorities of the minorities that diverge from those trends?Report

    • Kolohe in reply to Michael Drew says:
      May 10, 2018 at 4:47 pm

      I can’t remember the s***head who said it (there are so many) but someone running for Congress(?) said that any military officer who is a Democrat has something wrong mentallly.

      So there’s at least one conservative who is interested in policing ‘ownership’ for his own side.

      Eta here it is, Kevin Nicholson. He’s running for the US Senate and questioned the cognitive ability of any veteran that would vote DemocraticReport

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