On the evening cable news shows, the question of the hour seemed to be, "how did we get this so wrong?" with various talking heads arguing over why it was that Bush won, and how they missed it before the election. I figure that I have as much of a right as any of them to chime in, especially since I've been saying for a while that certain voting blocks weren't going to go as much for Kerry as conventional wisdom had it. I turned out to be right, especially on the Hispanic vote swinging much more towards Bush than people were expecting (while Kerry won the Hispanic vote overall, he did it by 9 points less than Gore did (Kerry got 53% according to CNN's exit polls), and in Florida, Bush won the Hispanic vote outright, a swing that handed him Florida by a nice margin).
Conventional wisdom has been that Hispanic voters vote Democratic. Historically, that's been correct, but what has happened over the past six or seven years, apparently without pundits noticing, is that Hispanic voters have been more favorable to Republican politics, particularly in certain key states like Florida. I started noticing a serious shift in Florida during the run up to the '98 governor's race, though I think that their has been a shift in the way that Republicans approached campaigning in that demographic at least as far back as '94, when George W. Bush was first elected governor of Texas, at least partly due to his success in campaigning among the Hispanic community. That year Jeb Bush narrowly lost the governor's race in Florida, and while it is often blamed on Lawton Chiles' last minute scare calls to elderly voters, the reality is that Jeb would have won handily if he had done what his brother did and made a significant effort to court the Hispanic vote (I still can't figure out how a guy who's wife is Mexican, who speaks primarily Spanish at home, and who's kids self-identify as Hispanic managed to ignore that demographic). In any case, Jeb and his strategists learned their lesson and when he ran again in '98, they campaigned hard for the Hispanic vote, and while he did not win a majority of Hispanic votes, it was a clear swing and enough to put him over the top. What was missed due to all of the Florida recount mess in 2000 was that although Hispanic voters went for Gore, they did so by a smaller margin than they have gone for Democrats in the past. By the 2002 Florida governor's race, the Republican party had done a pretty good job of locking up that demographic, and Jeb even won Miami-Dade. To make a long story short, the Hispanic vote has been shifting for quite a while, and while the Democrats and conventional political wisdom have taken their vote for granted, the Republicans haven't, and it showed big time in this election. In certain states like New Mexico which Gore won by under 400 votes, it's especially significant, because while Bush lost 2% of white voters from 2000 he picked up an additional 12% of Hispanic voters which is what gave him the lead there.
Another group that traditionally goes Democratic but that swung to Bush is Catholic voters, where Bush picked up 5% over 2000, to end up with 52% of the vote. (This also plays in to the swing in Hispanic votes, a group that is largely Catholic). The media has been reporting for months that Catholic bishops have been largely critical of Kerry on abortion, but it appears that the pundits didn't take that seriously, because today they seemed suprised by the swing.
The voting bloc that the media totally missed on was the black vote. The story line before the election was "majority of blacks support Kerry" when it should have been that the majority was smaller than it was for Gore. Nationwide, Bush picked up an increase of 2% over 2000, which comes down to somewhere around 250,000 votes nationwide, which doesn't seem like much until you consider that number makes up for half of the margin by which Gore won the popular vote in 2000. To see how that can make a difference, look at two of the key states that looked iffy, and which people were thinking would go for Kerry--Florida and Ohio. In Ohio, Bush picked up an additional 7% of the black vote, and in Florida, he picked up an extra 6%--that's a pick up of nearly 28,000 votes in a state that he carried by 535 votes in 2000.
Those were the three major factors that I was looking at that led me to believe that Bush was going to win, two of those three factors are ones that in retrospective, the tv pundits are saying that they missed. They still haven't noticed the significance of the small swing in black votes, and my guess is that they won't until they wake up the day after the election some year and discover that a Republican has picked up somewhere in the 40% range and won the black vote in certain states, and they'll be just as suprised then as they were this year when Bush swung the Hispanic vote to his side.
The other factor that I want to touch on is the youth vote. Some commentators (Scarborugh on MSNBC, for one) insist that the under-30 vote was a washout because it didn't carry Kerry to victory like people were saying it would before the election. Yeah, it turned out that the under-30 vote didn't turn out by as large margins as people were saying, but I think that the real issue is that they overestimated the percentage of the youth vote that would go for Kerry. Sure, Kerry won that demographic by 9 percentage points, but from what you heard before the election, people expected my age group to go for Kerry by margins that were much larger than that. Scarborough was going on and on Wednesday night about how all of the young people and the young bloggers were supposed to deliver Kerry the presidency, and it seemed to me that he has the impression that all young, blogging voters are leftist, and that just isn't an accurate portrayal, especially considering that it was young, blogging voters who helped push the whole 60 Minutes forgery story--the left doesn't have the corner on young bloggers. Actually, I'm tired of hearing the media act like leftist young people have the corner on the under-30 political activism market. It's like they think that people like me, and there are a lot of people like me, don't even count because we don't fit their sterotype of youth activists.
Note: All demographic data taken from CNN.com's exit poll data, which if anything is skewed Democratic, seeing as most of the exit polling turned out to be off in favor of the Democrats
Posted by kathryn at Noviembre 4, 2004 03:34 AM | TrackBack