Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 24: Racial voting patterns in 2008

Stephen Ansolabehere, Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart III did an article that publicly available for the April 2010 Harvard Law Review called Race, Region, and Vote Choice in the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Right Act. There's a lot of talk these days about the role of racism in current politics. More specifically, white racism, though out star pundits are reluctant to be quite that specific most of the time: that might imply that there's an issue on which "one side" is the main problem.

Our Big Pundits often do a sloppy job of talking about it. (Big surprise there!) But this article by Ansolabehere et al is a reminder that a very official determination about racial voting patterns and the heightened risk of racial discrimination in voting is part of the legal system in connection with the Voting Rights Act.

The current Voting Rights Act is a continuation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which delivered the death blow to the old, corrupt segregation-era of suppressing African-American votes in Deep South states. Maybe "death blow" is too strong a term, since the Republicans are now attempting vote-suppression efforts straight out of the old segregationist playbook and doing it on a nationwide basis. But the Voting Right Act remains a legal barrier to that practice.

The opening Abstract of the article summarizes the bottom line:

The election of an African American as President of the United States has raised questions regarding the continued relevance and even constitutionality of various provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Barack Obama’s apparent success among white voters in 2008 has caused some commentators to question the background conditions of racially polarized voting that are key to litigation under section 2 of the VRA. His success in certain states, such as Virginia, has also raised doubts about the formula for coverage of jurisdictions under section 5 of the VRA. This Article examines the data from the 2008 primary and general elections to assess the geographic patterns of racial differences in voting behavior. The data suggest that significant differences remain between white and minority voters and among jurisdictions that are covered and not covered by section 5 of the VRA. These differences remain even when controlling for partisanship, ideology, and a host of other politically relevant variables. This Article discusses the implications of President Obama’s election for legal conceptions of racially polarized voting and for decisions concerning which jurisdictions section 5 ought to cover.

Conservatives like to use the argument that Obama's election as President shows that white racism is effectively ended for all practical purposes. Whether they imagine that anyone believes that, least of all the most devoted followers of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the lesser lights of hate radio. But that argument not only becomes a one-size-fits-all excuse to deny that there's any manifestation of white racism among conservatives. It also serves as an argument to weaken the protection of the VRA at a time when Republicans have been mounting aggressive efforts at suppression on nonwhite voting. Ansolabehere et al give this more realistic summary of the racial implications of the Obama election:

Obama’s relative success in many other states may reveal the potential for minority candidates in those jurisdictions. In many states, all outside the South, Obama was able to win the white vote and therefore win the state. In still others (ten states according to the exit polls, including North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida), he lost among whites, but minority voters put him over the top. Finally, there are the states he lost, where he did not win a substantial share of the white vote and/or the minority population was not sizable enough for him to make up for that loss. To use the parlance of [VRA] section 2 to describe the geography of his victory: some states exhibited low rates of white bloc voting, and in others, despite high bloc voting, the minority community could still elect its candidate of choice. [my emphasis]

As the article explains, VRA opponents have mounted a Constitutional challenge to a section of the current version of the law which states, "The continued evidence of racially polarized voting in each of the [covered] jurisdictions ... demonstrates that racial and language minorities remain politically vulnerable, warranting the continued protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965." The article deals with the issue of the constitutionality of the "racially polarized voting" provision. But my main interest here is in the factual determination that racially polarized voting is a reality in several states, most of them from the old Confederacy.

States currently covered by VRA, which requires additional monitoring and review of those states' voting procedures and practices, include all of the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, though some municipalities in Virginia have been excluded. Individual counties in some other states are also covered. See the Justice Department's current map at Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions.

Yes, Sarah Palin's home state is one of the two states not from the old Confederacy that have statewide coverage under VRA. Does anyone need to wonder why Arizona is included? Although as the irrepressible JC Christian ("Jesus' General) points out, Arizona has made Jim Crow into "Jose Crow". He also tweets, "Lester Maddox family to sue AZ for trademark infringement" and "AZ's new #JoseCrow law is the perfect way to end Confederate Heritage Month."

The article also discusses some real problems complicating the effort to fairly estimate the racial component of voting patterns, such as the correlation between party affiliation and race. They observe:

... in a strict statistical sense, neither race nor party causes someone to vote for a particular candidate. Rather, at most, they represent group characteristics that might shed light on the reasons — racial identity or animus on the one hand, or ideological affinity and partisan loyalty on the other — why a voter might prefer one candidate over another. Even if multivariate analysis might demonstrate that partisanship is a more powerful predictor of candidate preferences than race, divergent voting behavior is still what prevents minorities under certain districting arrangements from having an “equal opportunity to elect” their preferred candidates.

Equal opportunity to elect is a particular legal concept used in voting rights law.

The Ansolabehere et al piece provides a wealth of voting statistics and analysis to warm the hearts of political junkies everywhere. But the point I'm emphasizing here is that their findings point to the same phenomenon documented in the "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South" American Journal of Political Science 49:3 (July 2005) article that I discussed two days ago. Voting patterns in the South continued to show significant differences from the rest of the country with race counting as a major factor, a heritage of generations of Jim Crow laws and Lost Cause ideology and education - a heritage enthusiastically continued by today's Republican Party.

Ansolabehere et al were looking at "covered" states and counties, i.e., those falling under the VRA, which therefore include Alaska and Arizona and a few other non-Southern counties. They found, if anything, racial polarization in voting increased in the covered areas between the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections. And this is after controlling statistically for both partisan and ideological factors:

Almost half of the variance in presidential voting results [in 2008] between covered counties can be explained by their racial makeup. ...

Although demographic and ideological variables account for much of the difference between whites in the covered and noncovered states, living in a covered state was a statistically significant factor for whites voting against Obama in 2008. This was not the case in 2004. The differences between whites in the covered and noncovered states could be attributed to such demographic and ideological variables when John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. The same cannot be said when Barack Obama ran against John McCain.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, us south