So yesterday I was listening to Patt Morrison on KPCC, and she was interviewing various people about prop 8. One of the topics that came up was, of course, support for prop 8 in the black community. But before she began her interview with Jasmyne Cannick, a black lesbian journalist who wrote an op/ed for the LA Times, she stated that “lack of black support wasn’t as substantial as initially reported – just over 50%, very much in line with much of the rest of the population.”
The archived show is here; Cannick’s segment starts around 25:00.
…did I hear that wrong? Am I going crazy? Is she right? If so, why can’t I find any mention of this anywhere else? Why is no one talking about it? Or is she just mistaken? If so, that seems like an incredible statement to make without checking your facts.
Has anyone else heard about this?
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
I attended a conference on LGBT rights today in Durham, NC where Kate Kendell (head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights) spoke about her work on Prop 8 and mentioned a similar statistic. She said that the original 70% was an overestimation and that the number was closer to 56 or 57%. They’re still waiting to get a more precise number, so I’m not sure if it’s completely accurate, but the discrepancy does seem to be pretty glaring. Haven’t heard about this anywhere else though.
It would make sense that people voting by absentee ballot (such as students and expats) would be the population more likely to be open-minded about same-sex marriage and thus more likely to vote against 8. Lots of places are just now finalizing the count on absentee ballots (part of why figuring how who’s won Senate races in MN and Alaska is taking so long). I’d be surprised if the number of black absentee voters is large enough to move the percentage by 13 points, though.
Also, I thought all these statistics were based on exit polls. How can we be waiting on numbers from exit polling? It’s all done of people as they exit the polls.
“Factually Unsupported Myth #1” here makes it pretty clear how this discrepancy is possible. Dunno what the source of the revised statistic is, but it’s not surprising.
A lot of the posting that Elusis links seems to be devoted to disproving the idea that African Americans were somehow the tipping point to cause Prop. 8’s passage. I don’t care whether they were the tipping point; I think what we should be concerned about is that they were the racial group that seems to have had the highest rate of approval for Prop. 8. If Asians had shown a similar rate of approval (instead of being 51% *against* Prop. 8, probably because the Asian-American voting population tends to be younger and more educated than the nonvoting Asians), I’d be asking, “OK, what is going on among Asian-American voters that they want to
The linked diary also gets the CNN statistics completely wrong in some places. For example, the diary claims that among Asian/Native voters (the “all other races” in CNN’s tally): 51% of 9% of 10,325,615 votes: 473,946 Yes.
Wrong. The CNN poll actually says that 51% of “all other races” voted NO. Asian-Americans and white women were the only statistically broken-out racial/ethnic groups with majorities against Prop. 8. Black women were the group with the highest approval of 8, 75%. This fits with Melinda Hennenberger’s and others’ longstanding claims about hostility toward same-sex marriage among African American women.
This may be from the Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles, which conducted exit polls for the city of Los Angeles (PDF). I reproduced the Prop 8 table at my LJ. The numbers for African-American voters in LA city:
Yes: 43%
No: 41%
Didn’t Vote: 2%
No Response: 12%
There’s also a note in the report that the methodology was specifically designed to accurately represent racial/ethnic groups.
Good catch, Tablesaw.
The bit that I always come back to is, even if the original numbers are 100% right, what are the similar numbers among white voters, when adjusted to match socioeconomic status, education, and church attendance?
I mean, frankly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if black voters voted no disproportionately, when adjusted for those factors. Gosh, you mean poor people, religious people, and less well-educated people tended to vote yes, regardless of their race? What a fucking shock. Eyeroll.
Or, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it:
—Myca
I would tend to expect L.A., which is more liberal than the rest of the state except for SanFran, to be disproportionately No and for black voters to track that tendency, so the Leavey numbers are a small part of the story.
Myca,
I agree with you on the influence of religiosity, but am not so sure about income. According to the CNN exit poll, people whose household income was $30k or less (what I would consider working-class/poor in California) voted for Prop. 8 in almost the same proportions as people who make $150k or more. It seems to be the middle class that most opposed 8.
I take Coates’s point about some social conservatism among African Americans, but is there really huge economic conservatism among African Americans? (Economic conservatism = opposition to government spending except on defense; preference for low capital gains, dividend and top marginal income tax rates, as well as for the abolition of the estate tax; minimal labor and environmental protections where they would interfere with maximization of profit; etc.) Every African American I know who is holds all of the above economic conservative beliefs is a Republican and seems to believe the GOP either isn’t all that racist or that it’s forgivable because they’re getting a more important issue right.
Oh, certainly, and I think you’re right. The conservatism I was talking about and Ta-Nehisi Coates was talking about was specifically social conservatism, since we’re discussing gay marriage.
—Myca
Nate Silver at 538.com did a nice job of disspelling Myth No. 1 at his place if you want to check that out.
bluestockingsrs,
Am I looking at the wrong post? How does this disprove “Factually Unsupported Myth #1: CNN’s 10% Black exit poll sample accurately reflects the actual distribution of voters on Proposition 8”? Silver seems to be relying on CNN’s exit poll without criticizing it.