Wednesday, June 09, 2004
What if...
Update: JMM has an update to his earlier post on the topic, devoted mostly to this argument about strategic behavior. See also his American Prospect article. Finally, see an unintentionally hilarious response from the WSJ which shows a deep ignorance of politics and race.
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TPM notes an undemocratic tendency of some pundits to pretend non-white voters aren't "really" voters. They say things like "The Democrat wouldn't have won the election if there weren't any blacks/Indians/Hispanics". As TPM concedes, why this is insulting is a subtle point, and many people who make such comments probably aren't aware that they are treating non-whites as less than citizens. But to see that it is at best pointless drivel, consider how a white person would react to the corollary statement: "Republicans wouldn't hold more than 5 seats in the House if there weren't any whites."
There's another problem here that TPM doesn't mention: these hypotheticals are completely silly. Don't get me wrong; I like counterfactual questions, and find them very useful. But you have to be careful when you set them up. If all black voters moved to Canada tomorrow, the Dems--who are strategic actors---wouldn't roll over and die, they would adjust.
Take an example electorate of 100 people:
50 white Republican voters........30 white Democratic voters.......20 black Democratic voters
To start, this is an evenly split district. Now suppose the 20 black Dems move away. Anaive conclusion is the Dems will lose future elections 50-30.
But why are people voting for D's and R's in the first place? As long as the reasons include things like policy differences and symbolism, the Dems can shift to be more like the R's, and peel away some of their voters. The ability of D's to scoop up R's is limited by factors outside the candidates' control (especially party identification socialized over a long period, the national party's platforms and image, and incumbency effects), but it's likely the D's will get more than the 30 voters they start with.
What's shifting as we including and exclude voting blocks is not the party labels on winning candidates, but something more tangible and important: the policies they support. So the right counterfactual is "if blacks (whites) didn't vote, policy would be more (less) conservative," which is a no brainer.
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TPM notes an undemocratic tendency of some pundits to pretend non-white voters aren't "really" voters. They say things like "The Democrat wouldn't have won the election if there weren't any blacks/Indians/Hispanics". As TPM concedes, why this is insulting is a subtle point, and many people who make such comments probably aren't aware that they are treating non-whites as less than citizens. But to see that it is at best pointless drivel, consider how a white person would react to the corollary statement: "Republicans wouldn't hold more than 5 seats in the House if there weren't any whites."
There's another problem here that TPM doesn't mention: these hypotheticals are completely silly. Don't get me wrong; I like counterfactual questions, and find them very useful. But you have to be careful when you set them up. If all black voters moved to Canada tomorrow, the Dems--who are strategic actors---wouldn't roll over and die, they would adjust.
Take an example electorate of 100 people:
50 white Republican voters........30 white Democratic voters.......20 black Democratic voters
To start, this is an evenly split district. Now suppose the 20 black Dems move away. Anaive conclusion is the Dems will lose future elections 50-30.
But why are people voting for D's and R's in the first place? As long as the reasons include things like policy differences and symbolism, the Dems can shift to be more like the R's, and peel away some of their voters. The ability of D's to scoop up R's is limited by factors outside the candidates' control (especially party identification socialized over a long period, the national party's platforms and image, and incumbency effects), but it's likely the D's will get more than the 30 voters they start with.
What's shifting as we including and exclude voting blocks is not the party labels on winning candidates, but something more tangible and important: the policies they support. So the right counterfactual is "if blacks (whites) didn't vote, policy would be more (less) conservative," which is a no brainer.
