John Shonder points to this article by Carl Bialik discussing this article by Steve Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart discussing the 2008 election. Ansolabehere and Stewart write:

Obama won because of race . . . Obama captured ten million more votes in 2008 than John Kerry did in 2004, resulting in a 4.6 percentage point swing toward the Democrats from 2004 to 2008. This swing did not occur similarly or uniformly among all politically relevant groups, as forecasting models might suggest. Most of the additional Democratic votes were cast by black and Hispanic voters–4.3 million and 2.7 million more, respectively. Democrats also gained among white voters, but the increase was a modest 3 million votes. . . . Obama gained not only by bringing new minority voters into the electorate, but also by converting minority voters who had previously been in the GOP stable.

This is consistent with instant election-night analysis (see item 4 here).

Ansolabehere and Stewart also write, “had Blacks and Hispanics voted Democratic in 2008 at the rates they had in 2004 while whites cast 43 percent of their vote for Obama, McCain would have won.” I don’t think that’s really a reasonable model, though, because that would be assuming that Obama would’ve outperformed Kerry more among whites than among nonwhites, which hardly seems plausible. To put it another way, Obama’s baseline swing among any group is his national swing, not zero. Given the state of the economy in November 2008, zero just doesn’t make sense as a baseline.

Similarly, Ansolabehere and Stewart write, “Had Obama relied only on a surge among young voters, holding other groups at the 2004 voting behaviors, he would have fallen short of victory.” Again, I think this is slightly misleading: Obama’s strategy was not to do better only young voters but rather to improve upon Kerry’s performance in general, but piling up a particular margin among the young. Which is what he did.

You can also slice up the vote swing geographically, by counties in different regions of the country, and you find that Obama did close to uniformly better than Kerry nearly everwhere, except for Republican-leaning poor counties in the South (where Obama pretty much stayed even with Kerry). The geographic patterns are striking (see graph at the end of this post).

Race matters, yes, but we’re still seeing a national swing.

Finally, I noticed that some of Bialik’s commenters focused on Obama’s racial appeal. I’d like to remind them that the Democrats gained even more in elections for the House of Representatives (compared to 2004) than Obama gained on Kerry. The House gains just weren’t so obvious because they were spread over two elections.

2008 was a Democratic year, Obama was a Democrat, and he won in one of the ways the Democrats could’ve won. With a different candidate there might have been different demographics but roughly the same national swing, and maybe a slightly different electoral map with a similar electoral vote total.

I think Ansolabehere and Snyder are right on the money when they write, “the results of the 2008 election challenge much of what has been conventionally thought about race and politics in America. Barack Obama has accomplished an astonishing political move [by] disproportionately energizing nonwhite voters and converting erstwhile Republican supporters within the minority community without alienating white voters.”

My summary: as Carl said, the election outcome is multidimensional. Because Steve and Charles were writing a short article, they very properly focused on a single feature of the election–race. I’d say that the #1 feature of the election was a bad economy that produced a national swing toward the Democrats in general and Obama and particular. But once you want to break this down by demographics, I agree that ethnicity is the biggest factor.

Andrew is skeptical about “balancing” arguments in explaining why Chambliss won the Georgia Senate runoff election so easily, favoring a low-turnout explanation. Nolan looks at data and finds, as suspected, that parties not in the White House tend to win such special elections.

I’m not sure why Andrew finds it difficult to believe in balancing, at least on the margin. After all, we’re not too surprised when partisan tides or “coattails” happen, as we’ve just seen in 2006 and 2008. Even long serving incumbents get the boot if they’re the unfavored party. But the key is that people don’t really understand the aggregate consequences of the partisan tide. That is, the complete results of their independent decisionmaking at the ballot box aren’t available until after the election is over.

Once that happens, the uncertainty is over. People can clearly see who’s in power. And if the people are moderate, which they are, when they look at the newly unified government which is highly polarized to their left or right, balancing should look a lot more enticing.

In other words, what I’m arguing is that, if we believe partisan tides happen, we should also believe in balancing. In fact, the low-turnout argument boosts the balancing story, as we’d expect the people who do turn out to be more politically knowledgeable and to better understand the consequences of their choice.

One more thing. In other single-member-district democracies, if I’m not mistaken, special elections (more typically called by-elections) are often seen as a strong signal to the governing party, especially in the negative direction. I think local and regional elections do the same thing for parliamentary democracies.

Nolan McCarty writes:

Saxby Chambliss won reelection in the Georgia Senate run-off by a somewhat surprising margin 57-43% margin over Democrat Jim Martin. . . . there seems to be an emerging pattern of the newly elected president’s party losing in run-off elections. Of course, the closest parallel was in Georgia in 1992 when republican Paul Coverdell beat incumbent Democrat Wyche Fowler following Bill Clinton’s presidential victory. . . . Political scientists and economists such as Alberto Alesina, Howard Rosenthal, and Mo Fiorina have offered a “balancing” explanation as to why the new president’s party performs poorly in these special elections and in midterm elections generally. The basic idea is that most voters are more ideological moderate than the two parties and therefore would like to balance them through divided government. . . . in a special or midterm election, voters have a clear opportunity to promote balance by voting against the president’s party.

Isn’t there a simpler explanation? Runoff elections generally have lower turnout than general elections (especially if the general election has the president on the ballot). Lower-turnout elections generally favor Republicans and conservatives. Chambliss won a plurality in the primary election, then you go to a lower-turnout runoff and you’d expect him to do even better, which he did. (Similarly for Republican candidate Coverdell in 1992.)

Is “balancing” really needed to explain this at all?

P.S. I agree with McCarty that the whole 60 votes thing has been overemphasized. Realistically there’s a limit to how many times the minority will want to filibuster against legislation that is popular enough to be passed by a majority in the House and Senate.

In our book, we discussed how the rich-state, poor-state divide was larger among the rich than the poor–or, to put it another way, how rich people in states such as Mississippi are much more Republican than poor people in Mississippi, but rich people in Connecticut do not vote so differently from poor people in Connecticut.

What happened in 2008? From the exit poll data at the CNN website, we get:

On the logarithmic scale:

The x-positions of these lines are in different places because Mississippi and Connecticut got small samples and CNN didn’t post the percentages for some of the extreme categories which had small n’s.

Here are three states ranging from Texas (strongly Republican) to Florida (battleground) to California (strongly Democratic). Texas actually has a higher per-capita income than Florida, but here are the exit poll data in any case:

The more systematic thing to do is to look at all 50 states. In each, I took McCain’s share of the two-party vote for each income category where we had data, then regressed it on the category numbers (which we originally numbered 1 through 8 and then standardized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 0.5). I then plotted these regression coefficients on a graph along with state income:

The y-scale of the graph roughly represents McCain’s vote share among the rich minus his share among the poor, within the state. We see the familiar pattern from our book, that the association of rich with Republican holds everywhere but is strongest in poor states. The states are colored as red or blue where McCain or Obama won by more than 10% of the two-party vote, and purple for the states in between.

But there’s a potential problem here, as illustrated by the Mississippi-Connecticut pattern above. The data from Mississippi are more at the low end of income, and the data from Connecticut are more at the high end. We already know that the relation between income and Republican voting flattens out at higher incomes, and so maybe Connecticut’s flat slope arises just because we’re taking its numbers from the flatter part of the curve.

To correct for this, for each state we take the regression plotted above, then we fit the same regression to the same range of incomes from the national exit poll, then we add back in the full regression of the national poll using all eight income categories. The result is a quick estimate of what the entire difference between rich and poor would be in the state, if we were to have sufficient data from all eight income categories within each state.

And here’s the result:

A few of the southern states on the left part of the graph have high rich-poor voting differences (even after controlling for the range of incomes where the comparisons were being made), but the overall pattern of rich and poor states isn’t so strong.

Further thoughts:

1. Larry Bartels comments that if you only look at whites, the rich voter, poor voter pattern is similar in rich and in poor states. So one of our main findings from the Red State, Blue State book from the 2000 and 2004 elections did not persist in 2008.

2. Boy do I want the raw exit poll data so I don’t have to screw around with these artificial missing data problems.

3. I also want some pre-election poll data. The exit polls were so screwed up this year, I don’t fully trust anything based on exit poll data alone.

John Kastellec made this graph of seats and votes in 2006 and 2008. For each year, the dot is what actually happened and the line is our estimated seats-votes curve based on modeling from the previous election year.

The Democrats did well in both years, but they didn’t get as many seats as we would’ve expected, given their vote share. As I’ve already discussed, the Democrats’ 56% share of the average district vote was pretty impressive, a 5.7 percentage point gain since 2004:

But the Democrats performed less well than expected in converting votes to seats. This explains to me why Charlie Cook et al. felt that the Democrats’ performance was disappointing. At the level of voters, however (and of public opinion), the party did fine in congressional voting.

This note by Nate inspired me to check the vote swings by county population. I don’t have the urban/suburban/rural status of counties in an easily grabbable form (maybe Boris has these and can send to me) and so as something quick I plotted vote swing vs. county population. Actually, I don’t have county population right here either and so I used total number of votes in the county in 2004. Many of the large-population counties are urban (such as Los Angeles, the largest); others are major suburban counties. Anyway, here’s what we see:

The blue line is the lowess curve fit to the data. There’s a lot of variation–county size is not such a good predictor of swing–but there is indeed a pattern of bigger Obama swings in larger counties. (The counties are already ordered by size so there’s no need to use larger circles to indicate larger counties as I did in the plots of county income posted earlier.)

To understand this better, let’s break up the data by region of the country. Also, since we’re at it, let’s look at swings in the past couple of elections as well.

Here are the swings broken up by region of the country for the past few elections. The left column shows 1996/2000, the middle column shows 2000/2004, and the right column shows 2004/2008.

What do we see?
1. The large-county/small-county differential in Obama’s gains was particularly strong in the south and did not occur at all in the northeast. For example, Obama won 84% of the two-party vote in Philadelphia–but Kerry got 80% there four years ago. This 4% swing was about the same as Obama’s swing nationally. Part of the issue here is that Obama had almost no room for improvement in these places.

2. The pattern of Democrats improving more in large-population counties is not unique to 2008. Gore did (relatively) well in big counties in all regions in 2000.

Here’s the article by Aaron, Noah, and myself on a topic we’ve discussed more formally before: why it makes sense, when voting, to consider the election outcome as it affects the country as a whole rather than just its effects on yourself.

Just in case you stumbled upon this blog by accident . . .

Yair made the graphs. See here for his explanation.

Sometimes you hear discussion of how the red states get more from the government than they pay in taxes while the blue states get less and pay more.  This is slightly misleading because the blue states are richer and rich people pay a higher rate of income tax, but it does raise the interesting question of the national effects of the graduated income tax.

For some perspective on where this is coming from, here’s a fun bit from chapter 9 of our book:

In our office is a map from 1924 titled “Good Roads Everywhere” that shows a proposed system of highways spanning the country, “to be built and forever maintained by the United States Government.” The map, made by the National Highways Association, also includes the following explanation for the proposed funding system:  “Such a system of National Highways will be paid for out of general taxation.  The 9 rich densely populated northeastern States will pay over 50 per cent of the cost. They can afford to, as they will gain the most.  Over 40 per cent will be paid for by the great wealthy cities of the Nation. . . . The farming regions of the West, Mississippi Valley, Southwest and South will pay less than 10 per cent of the cost and get 90 per cent of the mileage.” Beyond its quaint slogans (“A paved United States in our day”) and ideas that time has passed by (“Highway airports”), the map gives a sense of the potential for federal taxing and spending to transfer money between states and regions.

I’ll see if I can get someone to take a picture of this amazing map so I can post it on the blog.