In the aggregate, we estimate that Mr. Obama won 16 percent of white voters in a broadly defined Deep South, including Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. In the countryside, Mr. Obama tended to run behind these figures — often winning less than 10 percent of the white vote.
No, Obama Didn’t Win One-Third of White Voters in Deep South
Nate Cohn
APRIL 24, 2014
nytimes.com
This morning, I published an article on the decline of Democratic support among white Southerners from West Texas to the Atlantic Coast. In that region, Mitt Romney often won by margins so large that they rivaled President Obama’s advantage among black voters. Larry Bartels, writing for The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, disputes my argument and claims Mr. Obama had widespread white support in the south.
In vigorously disagreeing, Mr. Bartels offers a single piece of evidence to the contrary: post-election surveys that show that Mr. Obama received between 30 and 35 percent of the vote in the South.
But the exit polls, conducted on Election Day of actual voters rather than post-election, show that Mr. Obama received only 28 percent of the Southern white vote. And the definition of the South in those polls is much larger than the region about which I was writing. The polls include states like Maryland, Florida, Delaware and Virginia — states that were separate from my argument. Without those more Democratic states, Mr. Obama’s share of the white vote in the remainder of the South drops significantly.
How did we calculate Mr. Obama’s support among white Southerners? First, we estimated the composition of the electorate in every county by race, using data from the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey. Then we estimated the number of nonwhite voters won by Mr. Obama using exit poll data, combining national exit-poll data with local demographic data. We then subtracted the number of nonwhite Obama voters from his overall support, leaving us with his support among white voters.
Is this method perfect? No. It would not work well when a racial group’s voting patterns vary greatly by region. But that’s not the case here. Most nonwhite voters in the South are black, and they all but uniformly supported the president (based on a variety of evidence, including returns in overwhelmingly black precincts). If there’s a county that’s 50 percent black where Mr. Obama won 50 percent of the vote, it’s not hard to figure out that Mr. Obama won very few white votes.
In the aggregate, we estimate that Mr. Obama won 16 percent of white voters in a broadly defined Deep South, including Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas. In the countryside, Mr. Obama tended to run behind these figures — often winning less than 10 percent of the white vote.
The estimates closely resemble the exit polls, where available. Our method also suggests that Mr. Obama won about 28 percent of the white vote in the broader South.
I do think there is one fair critique of the article: Our headline was about the South, rather than the more specific Deep South. Using “the South” gives the impression that extreme racial polarization exists throughout the region, not just from West Texas to the Atlantic Coast of Georgia. That said, the article is quite clear about the scope of racial polarization. The map makes it quite clear as well. We were not writing about Maryland or Miami.
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