Procrastination

Election Day is Tuesday (I support Why Tuesday? in changing it to a weekend or a holiday), November 3. Since this is an off year, there aren’t any big contests.

Here in the city of Milton in North Fulton county, we have some city council elections.

The current mayor, Joe Lockwood, is running unopposed. So we are left with three city council members. Interestingly, the council members are elected at large, i.e. by all of Milton, with the condition being that the candidates must reside in the district which they want to represent. The at-large election means that voters like me have to think strategically about the balance of power in the city council rather than just the suitability of individual candidates.

Two good resources for the election are the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Voter Guide, which provides information about all of the Atlanta metro area, and the Access Milton blog for local Milton news.

The main issue for the city council election is development and growth. This area of Fulton county used to be very rural in the recent past and even now there are big farms in most of Milton. However, there has been some development too, especially in the Crabapple area and on Highway 9. Lots of people here want to keep the “rural character” and oppose extension of sewer and “high density” development. I put high density in quotes because around here 1 acre lots count as high density. We come from much higher density of course. We lived in the AtlantaPiscataway, NJ (density: 2,688.6/sq mi). Milton’s density is about 556/sq mi.

I don’t mind growth. In fact, I like growth. And I don’t like the idea of local governments limiting growth and encumbering the free market. Of course, growth can be dumb or smart. And mindless growth at the time of a real estate boom can leave lots of ghost neighborhoods. But that is something that can be managed such that the city grows naturally and in a smart and sustainable way. I should probably also mention that I live on a quarter acre lot which is tiny by Milton standards. I don’t know why the people who like free markets and dislike the government, like they do here in North Fulton, are so big on using the municipal government to stop the evil developers.

Let’s look at the individual races for the Milton City Council.

In District 1, where I live, the contest is between the incumbent Karen Thurman. According to her detractors, Thurman is in the pocket of developers. Wolff wants to keep the rural character of the city. I was leaning towards Thurman but what pushed me over to her was the discovery that Wolff was part of the dishonest Swift Boat Sailors & POWs for Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

In District 3, incumbent Bill Lusk is the only one on the ballot but Al Trevillyan is running as a write-in candidate. Al’s basically the anti-sewer candidate. I am not entirely sure about this one, especially since I can’t find much information about Lusk’s position on the issues. But I am leaning towards voting for Lusk.

In District 5, incumbent Tina D’Aversa is running against Joe Longoria. D’Aversa is supporting the challenges to Lusk and Thurman, so she’s on the anti-development side, though Milton’s local politics has been very acrimonious and personal, so there might be more to it than a difference of opinion on the issues. I must say I have found reading D’Aversa’s website, press releases and campaign literature difficult because of over-the-top self-praise. Also, D’Aversa has an ethics complaint filed against her for trying to bribe her opponent to withdraw. I agree with Longoria that Milton’s top challenge is raising enough revenue to provide good services and infrastructure. Thus, I am supporting Longoria.

Going over the candidates’ biographies, it’s interesting that I am supporting a Georgia Tech graduate (I am one too) and two engineers (Software and Civil Engineering) while I am an Electrical Engineer.

UPDATE (Nov 3 11:57am): Just voted at my local precinct. There was almost nobody there.

UPDATE (Nov 4 8:09am): The candidates I endorsed for the city council, Thurman, Lusk and Longoria, won. The turnout was 19.4%.

Related Reading:

Specs listed the podcasts she listens to and Razib also mentioned a podcast recently, so I thought I should list the stuff I have been listening to on my iPhone and may be Razib and others can chime in with some suggestions.

Here’s my current list of podcasts:

• BBC Radio 4 Beyond Belief
• BBC Radio 4 In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
• BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed
• NPR Planet Money
• NPR On Science
• NPR Science Friday
• NPR Technology
• Science and the City: I just started listening to this podcast, so not sure yet if I’ll continue.
• This Week in Google: Interesting, but too long at 1 hour every week, especially as it has some filler and could be shortened.
• TED Talks: Some good talks, some just boring.
• The New York Review of Books Podcast
• The New Yorker Comment, Out Loud, and The Political Scene podcasts
• President Obama’s weekly address
• White House Speeches (I don’t listen to all of them, but subscribe to keep track)

In addition, here are some courses and lectures on iTunes U and as podcasts that I have been listening to or that are in my listening queue:

• Historical Jesus
• The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
• Slavery and Abolition
• Lincoln and the Civil War
• The History of Rome
• The Roman Empire
• Imperial Rome and Ostia
• Introduction to Ancient Greek History

What do you recommend?

Related Reading:

I don’t usually read books by politicians, especially about current politics. However, being an Obama supporter and volunteer, I thought I should read his book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

I had already read Dreams From My Father and loved Obama’s writing style. The Audacity of Hope is also written well. Of course, I liked Dreams From My Father better, but that’s because of its subject of autobiography and identity.

The Audacity of Hope was written when Barack Obama was a US Senator and I started reading it a bit before the election. I finished it around inauguration time. As to why I didn’t read it earlier? I got it early in 2008 but then most of my spare time was consumed by the election campaign. I started the book only when I went to Pakistan for a couple of weeks in October.

In this book, Obama explains his views and his political program. Having followed his career since his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, I was familiar with a lot of his views. But two things still stood out. One is how Obama is actually fairly moderate. The other is Obama’s tendency to give an honest airing to conservative views and even agreeing partly before arguing for his liberal viewpoint on any issue. This quality, the so-called post-partisanship, was evident throughout the book.

Related Reading:

I have been knee deep in torture recently. No, I haven’t been tortured nor have I tortured anyone. I have been reading about torture. I recently wrote about torture in my review of Taxi to the Dark Side where I collected links to my previous writings on the subject as well. I also discussed US public opinion about torture a few months ago.

With the recent release of the OLC torture memos, the torture debate has restarted again. There have been calls for prosecuting those who carried out the torture and/or those who made the policy decisions. Obama has called for looking forward instead of backward (imagine if every criminal had the same attitude). Senator McCain is against investigating torture or prosecuting anyone.

I am generally of the opinion that if the state must fall it must fall but we should get to the truth. However, after reading a lot about torture I have a distinct feeling that there is not going to be any prosecutions and even if there are, the chances of acquittal are very high. I find myself agreeing with most of the points Tyler Cowen makes against prosecution. The public opinion just isn’t there against torture (more on this in a bit). Hence, I believe it is more important to build a consensus against torture than to prosecute, as Matt Yglesias argues.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do anything. For starters, we should make sure that the architects of the torture policy, like George Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, etc. are kept far from the levers of power. Therefore, I support efforts to impeach Jay Bybee, former head of OLC and currently a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Also, we need a commission or some other mechanism to make public all the details about torture as practiced during the Bush era.

There are some who think that it was the higher echelons of the Bush administration that was responsible for torture. I think it’s clear now that this is wrong. Democratic leaders might not have ordered the torture (or “enhanced interrogation”) but some of them knew about it and some even approved. Similarly, other Western governments or their intelligence agencies were complicit, directly or indirectly, in renditions, torture, black sites, or sharing intelligence.

While there were courageous people in the military, government and civil society who opposed torture and did try to stop such practices, there were also a lot of others, lawyers, military commanders, CIA personnel and others, who were fully complicit in requesting, approving and implementing torture. I am about to finish reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side and it makes the case in detail. See, for example, former CIA counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer’s response or Condi Rice’s defense of imperial powers for the President.

That’s why I found the case of abolishing the CIA to be worth considering. CIA has a history of illegal activities (see Family Jewels and Church Committee Report and Iran-Contra report). Spencer Ackerman argues against abolition of CIA, but I found Quincy Adams and Matt Yglesias more convincing.

As for arguments about torture and its efficacy, I think torture is wrong regardless of whether it can yield any useful information or not. It is possible for torture to extract true information, though typically there’ll be lots of false confessions as well. However, it’s inhuman and morally wrong and that’s why we shouldn’t do it. As Obama said recently:

waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. […] And that’s why I put an end to these practices. I am absolutely convinced that it was the right thing to do — not because there might not have been information that was yielded by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we could have gotten this information in other ways — in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.

I agree wholeheartedly with Kevin Drum’s reasons for opposing torture.

I don’t care about the Geneva Conventions or U.S. law. I don’t care about the difference between torture and “harsh treatment.” I don’t care about the difference between uniformed combatants and terrorists. I don’t care whether it “works.” I oppose torture regardless of the current state of the law; I oppose even moderate abuse of helpless detainees; I oppose abuse of criminal suspects and religious heretics as much as I oppose it during wartime; and I oppose it even if it produces useful information.

The whole point of civilization is as much moral advancement as it is physical and technological advancement. But that moral progress comes slowly and very, very tenuously. In the United States alone, it took centuries to decide that slavery was evil, that children shouldn’t be allowed to work 12-hour days on power looms, and that police shouldn’t be allowed to beat confessions out of suspects.

On other things there’s no consensus yet. Like it or not, we still make war, and so does the rest of the world. But at least until recently, there was a consensus that torture is wrong. Full stop. It was the practice of tyrants and barbarians. But like all moral progress, the consensus on torture is tenuous, and the only way to hold on to it — the only way to expand it — is by insisting absolutely and without exception that we not allow ourselves to backslide. Human nature being what it is — savage, vengeful, and tribal — the temptations are just too great. Small exceptions will inevitably grow into big ones, big ones into routine ones, and the progress of centuries is undone in an eye blink.

Let’s look at recent polls about torture and investigation.

In the NBC/WSJ poll, 50% disapprove of Obama ordering the closing of Guantanamo detainee prison and 53% disapprove of the release of the OLC torture memos. 53% think that the Bush administration used torture while 30% say that they didn’t. 46% say that the harsh interrogation helped the US extract information while 42% think it hurt the US by undermining its moral authority. And only 33% want a criminal investigation of the Bush torture policy.

In the Washington Post/ABC News poll, 53% support Obama’s release of the torture memos. 48% think there are cases when torture should be considered and 51% support an investigation of the treatment of detainees.

In a Gallup poll, 51% favor an investigation of harsh interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration, but 55% think such treatment of terrorism suspects was justified.

30%, seem to agree with Cheney’s position that the ends justified the means and that no investigation is necessary. Nearly as many (25%), though, would appear to side with many congressional Democrats who say the techniques should not have been used and an investigation is warranted. Twenty-three percent think the techniques were warranted yet still favor an investigation, while 10% think the methods should not have been used but nevertheless oppose an official inquiry.

66% of Democrats favor an investigation while only 48% of independents and 37% of Republicans do. 39% of Democrats think use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects were justified while 55% of independents and 80% of Republicans agree.

In the New York Times/CBS News poll, 37% say waterboarding and other aggressive techniques are sometimes justified to extract information from a suspected terrorist while 46% disagree. Interestingly, only 16% of African Americans think they are justified. Only 71% consider waterboarding to be torture. 34% want Congress to investigate torture and warrantless wiretapping. 47% want to keep the Gitmo prison while 44% want to close it.

As you can see, there is some variation in these surveys. Nate Silver and Andrew Gelman try to explain why that is. While support for torture investigation varies from 33% to 51% in the various polls, the other numbers are a bit more consistent. The country seems to be almost equally divided on whether the torture memos should have been released and whether the Gitmo prison should be closed. Those who think torture is sometimes or always justified seem to vary from 37% to 55% while opposition to torture never reaches majority status either.

Looking at my previous writing on public opinion about torture, there doesn’t seem to have been any big change in public opinion in the US.

Finally, Pew did a survey about torture breaking down the numbers by religion, attending church, political party, etc.

Only a quarter of Americans are against torture under all conditions. This is astounding, but even worse is that only one of six white evangelicals and one in seven Republicans thinks torture is never justified. Even if we are generous and add up the numbers for those who think torture is rarely justified to the “never justified” ones, only 47% of Americans are against the use of torture. But only one-third of white evangelicals and 35% of Republicans are opposed to torture. I guess we could call these people the American Taliban.

While the Pope has come out against torture, among his followers American White Catholics a bare majority believes torture is often or sometimes justified. I wonder if any priest will deny communion to these torture-supporters.

The only groups (among those listed) with a majority who think torture is never or rarely justified are White mainline Protestants (53%), the unaffiliated (55%), those who seldom or never attend religious services (53%) and Democrats (60%). It’s disappointing that even these numbers are so low.

It can be argued that this support of torture by the religious is not a result of their being religious but rather due to the fact that those who are more religious are more likely to be Republicans in the US. I would agree with that, however, if religion can’t even get the deeply religious to oppose such an inhuman practice as torture, what use is such religion?

Related Reading:

The debate over homosexual marriage is simmering again in California. Opponents of Proposition 8 are making their case in the California Courts, arguing that California’s recent constitutional amendment violates the civil rights of those engaged in homosexual practices.

To gain clarity on this discussion, one can put it in a different context. Consider a sandwich shop on Crow Street, U.S.A. A white man walks into the sandwich shop, looks at the menu and orders a turkey on rye sandwich. An attendant prepares the sandwich and gives it to the white man. The white customer pays the attendant and walks out. Then, a black man comes to the same shop, orders the same sandwich but receives a very different response. The black man is told that this shop cannot serve him.

This is an example of what? If all else is equal, we clearly witnessed an example of a civil rights violation. Specifically, we are seeing Jim Crow racism in action. Why? Put simply, the white man could get something the black man could not simply because of his skin color.

Now, let us look at a modification of the previous scenario. A black man walks into a sandwich shop on Main Street, U.S.A. He walks to the counter without viewing the menu or glancing at the order board above the attendant’s head. Then, he asks for a Brontosaurus on Soylant Green sandwich. Dumfounded, the attendant replies, “Well, sir, that’s not on the menu.” He continues, “The brontosaurs went extinct millions of years ago and Solyant Green is just a mythical construct invented for a 1970s movie starring Charlton Heston.” The resigned though still hungry black man walks out, passing a white man on the way into the shop. The white man, astonishingly, asks for the same brontosaurus on Soylant Green sandwich. To this request, the attendant counters, “look, pal, I do not know what type of joke this is, but that’s just not on the menu.”

Now, this is an example of what? A civil rights violation? Racism? No. They received equal treatment. Both the white man and the black man asked for the same thing, and both were refused. The reason was simple; the request was not on the menu.

Moving closer to our targeted issue, imagine a justice of the peace’s office on Getto Street in Warsaw, Poland in 1940. A blond haired, blue eyed Methodist (a protestant Christian denomination) woman walks into the office arm in arm with the man who hopes to marry her. After explaining their intentions, the German appointed justice of the peace asks for their papers. He reviews them, abruptly stops and harshly says, “You, sir, are a Jew. A Jew will never marry an Aryan in Hitler’s Poland!” The couple withdraws in fear. A month later, the same woman returns with a Methodist male companion and requests a marriage license. The same justice of the peace reviews their papers and grants the happy couple a marriage license.

What is this? A civil rights violation has occurred. In this situation, we see religious discrimination. The Jewish fiancée was denied the right to marry his gal, but a protestant man was able to marry the woman without a problem.

Let’s return to Ghetto Street. As a way of compensating for losing his one love, the Jewish man finds three Jewish women willing to enter into a polygamous marriage with him. So, he braves the justice of the peace once more to ask for a marriage license. Without even looking at the papers of the four people before him, the justice exclaims, “You want to marry how many girls! This is, of course, entirely illegal, and I cannot do it.” Moments later, a Methodist man arrives with three blonds in tow. He says, “I can’t wait to marry these gals; let’s get the paperwork out of the way!” To this the justice responds, “This must be international polygamy day! However, the law remains; you cannot marry more than one woman, sir.”

In this scenario, we again see the difference between a civil rights violation and fair application of a rule. Neither man could marry his trio. The discriminatory religious preference of the justice of the peace did not affect his decision. The law stated that one person could have but one spouse at a time, and the justice applied the law fairly.

Connecting the two situations and four scenarios described, one can see that both highlight the difference between civil rights violations and fair applications of societal prohibitions. Civil rights violations occur when a particular group enjoys privileges fundamentally denied to others. When you strip the emotion and religious arguments away, it is fairly easy to see and understand this.

Let’s apply our newfound clarity to the homosexual marriage issue. We need to answer one fundamental question. Are homosexuals asking for a privilege given only to heterosexuals, or are they asking for something denied to both groups? In the former case, homosexuals would be the victims of a civil rights violation, but in the latter, they are simply asking for something “not on the menu.” Homosexuals are asking for the ability to marry people of the same sex. Heterosexuals have not asked for this ability, but under current laws, same sex marriage would be denied to heterosexuals as well. Neither group benefits from its sexual practices. Neither group enjoys a privilege denied to other. Therefore, homosexuals are not suffering a denial of rights. They are merely asking for a change in existing laws meant to benefit their group, a case of simple self-interest – not civil rights.

I usually do not read autobiographies. Or books by politicians. But Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is an exception.

First of all, it’s written by Barack Obama and was written before he got into politics. So it’s refreshingly honest. Secondly, Obama writes well, very well.

Dreams from My Father is basically about the young Obama’s quest for identity. As a child of a Kenyan black man and a Kansan white woman who was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents, he was somewhat of an outsider to both the African American experience and the general White majority.

It is a work of self-reflection and Obama comes across as a thoughtful and honest person.

I read the book on the way to Pakistan (more about that in my next blog post) and during my stay there.

If you want to understand Obama the man and where he comes from, I think this book is essential reading.

Related Reading:

This is the last in my series analyzing the 2008 election in the state of Georgia. I looked at statewide numbers in my first article. The next article looked at county level results and also racial polarization. In the 3rd article, I analyzed the results in Fulton county and specifically the precincts in which our team of Obama volunteers worked.

Georgia has a law according to which a winning candidate needs 50% + 1 of the votes cast, otherwise there is a runoff election between the top two candidates. In the general election on November 4, incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss failed to get 50% and thus was forced into a runoff with the Democratic candidate Jim Martin. Interestingly, this was the second runoff for Jim Martin this year since he had won in a runoff election in the Democratic primary too after no one got 50% in the crowded filed of Democratic Senate candidates in the primary election.

I did not work for the Jim Martin campaign and in fact was fairly certain that he would lose the runoff because Georgia is still a Republican state and there are a lot more habitual Republican voters here than Democratic ones. The Obama campaign had done a good job of registering voters and then bringing the sporadic voters out to vote for the general election, but there was no way that could be repeated for a runoff. Also, from our voter contact when we were volunteering for the Obama campaign, we knew that Sarah Palin was quite popular among Republicans here, perhaps more than John McCain (McCain got 31.6% of the vote and came in 2nd behind Huckabee and barely ahead of Romney in the Feb 5 primary.)

As you can see, a lot less people voted in the runoff than in the general election. Let’s look at the voter retention rate, i.e. the number of votes for a candidate in the runoff as a proportion of the votes in the general election.

While only about 57% of the voters in the general voted in the runoff, they were not evenly distributed between the parties. Democrat Jim Martin barely managed to get half of his voters to pull the lever for him again while Republican Saxby Chambliss was successful with almost two-thirds of his voters. This is why the Republican margin increased from 2.92% on November 4 to 14.92% on December 2.

Let’s plot the percentage of votes the two candidates got in each county in the general and the runoff elections. The circles represent individual counties and their area is proportional to the number of registered voters in that county.

Chambliss performed better in all counties and Martin performed worse in almost all in the runoff when compared with the general election.

Another way to look at the data is to compare the vote retention rates for Chambliss and Martin.

Chambliss got about 60-70% of his general election vote in most counties, especially the more populous counties while Martin only got 45-60% in most. The only counties close to parity in terms of vote retention were really small.

I was wondering whether there was any pattern to the vote retention in terms of partisanship. So I plotted the Chambliss and Martin retention rates against the percentage in that county that voted for Obama on November 4.

This is a slight upward trend as the counties get more Democratic. However it is still very low.

We see much less of a pattern here.

Related Reading:

I did some analysis of the Presidential election in the state of Georgia in two installments. Today I’ll look at Fulton county where I live as well as the specific precincts in Alpharetta, Milton and South Atlanta where our team worked as volunteers for the Obama campaign.

There was a 15.3% swing towards Obama in Fulton county compared to Kerry in 2004. The turnout, based on the number of registered voters, stayed constant from 2004 to 2008. However, if we use the voting age population estimates (VAP) for Fulton county, we get the following turnout rates:

This shows a bigger turnout in 2008. One reason for the discrepancy between the turnout in the first table and this one is that the Obama campaign focused a lot on voter registration this year and thus got more people registered.

Also, please note that the VAP turnout estimate is probably lower than the real turnout which should be calculated as a proportion of the voting eligible population.

Out of the 3,924,440 votes cast for President in Georgia this year, 2,084,179 (or 53.11%) were cast during advance/early voting or by absentee mail-in. In Fulton county, 184,240 votes (45.42%) were cast early, absentee or provisional out of a total of 405,628 votes cast. This is very unusual for Georgia and Fulton as can be seen in the table below for Fulton county. (This shows the numbers for the 2004 general election for President, the 2006 election for Governor, the 2008 Presidential Primary on Super Tuesday and the 2008 general Presidential election.)

In the 2008 general election, the Obama campaign tried to get everyone to vote early. The effect of this can be seen in the early voting numbers in Fulton county where Obama had a 49.5% lead in early voting compared to a 22.9% lead on polling day itself.

The large numbers of early voters have complicated my precinct level analysis. The precinct level data does not include early or absentee votes which are listed separately as one per county. Still let’s see what we can conclude for our precincts.

For the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaign in October and then the first four days of November, we were based in the South Atlanta precincts, 12E1, 12J and 12T, which are just north of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. These precincts are heavily Democratic (more than 90%) but there are a lot of sporadic voters there. So the main task was to get the vote out.

Thus, turnout as a percentage of registered voters increased from 57.4% to 64.3% while actual number of people who voted in these three precincts increased from 2,108 to 3,339, a 58% increase in the number of voters. Compare this 58% increase to a 22.6% increase over the whole of Fulton county and a 19.6% increase over all of Georgia. I am actually pleased at these numbers and I am sure all of our Obama team would be too.

Let’s now look at the precincts in Alpharetta and Milton where we made the most calls, starting in August, for identifying voters, persuading them and then getting them out to vote. The table below shows the Republican advantage over Democrats. For the 2008 Presidential Primary, I added the votes for all the Republican Presidential candidates together and did the same for the Democrats. Let’s take the example of ML01A in the 2008 general election, McCain got 73.5% and Obama got 25.3%, which means a Republican advantage of 73.5-25.3=48.2%.

I couldn’t find the data for the 2004 Presidential election for the Milton (MLxx) precincts but AP07B had a 42.9% Republican advantage in 2004.

Before I opine on those results, let’s look at the turnout (as a percentage of registered voters) in these precincts:

We already know that about half of Georgia and Fulton county voters voted early. The early voters are not listed in the last two tables for the Alpharetta/Milton precincts because they are not reported that way by Fulton county. Looking at the election day turnout for Milton, it seems that fewer than half of the voters voted early.

Because we only have the vote breakdown by party for those who voted in person at their polling location on November 4 and a significant number of voters had voted early in 2008, we cannot really say what the margin between McCain and Obama was in Alpharetta and Milton. There is no reason to believe that the early voters had the same partisan distribution as those on election day. In fact, there is reason to believe that the early voters were more likely to be Obama supporters. The Obama campaign had been working hard asking people to vote early. Also, in the whole of Fulton county, Obama had a 49.5% advantage in early voting compared to a 22.9% advantage on polling day. Thus, the very large Republican margin in the Milton precincts in 2008 is most likely not correct. I can say with certainty that McCain won all those precincts except ML06 but probably with a somewhat smaller margin. Even then, Republicans had a huge advantage here in North Fulton. Unfortunately, we don’t have any way of finding out whether our team was able to reduce that Republican advantage or not.

Next: A look at the Senate runoff between Jim Martin and Saxby Chambliss.

Related Reading:

Continuing with my election analysis in Georgia, my data source is the Secretary of State’s website:

• 2004 County level results
• 2004 county registration and turnout statistics by race and gender
• 2008 county level results
• 2008 county voter registration statistics by race and gender

Let’s start with a graph showing Obama’s share of the vote in each Georgia county versus Kerry’s share four years ago. Please note that the size of the circles is proportional to the total number of registered voters in that county.

Since there was an 11.4% swing towards Obama compared to Kerry, a majority of the counties show a larger percentage for Obama as compared to Kerry. This is especially true of large (in population) counties. Since Georgia has 159 counties, let’s redo the same graph separately for the large, middle and small counties.

In the largest 53 counties (min number of registered voters 17,354 and max 554,682), only the most Republican counties got more Republican compared to 2004.

In the middle 53 counties (registered voters ranging from 8,182 to 17,018), the situation was a lot more mixed, but Obama did lose a lot of ground in some.

In the 53 counties with the lowest populations (registered voters ranging from 1,371 to 7,988), Obama did better in some and worse in others. However, these rural counties don’t have many people and probably didn’t matter much at all for the Presidential election.

Since one major reason for Obama’s better performance was the higher turnout and vote from African Americans, let’s look at the same data, i.e. Obama’s total vote share compared to Kerry’s, but by categorizing counties by how white they are. I am using the percentage of registered white voters in a county as a proxy for the percent population that’s non-Hispanic White in a county.

The whitest third of the counties are at least 77% white. Do note that the scales of this graph are different from the earlier graphs. Obama did worse in the smaller, whiter counties than Kerry and better in the bigger white counties. But he didn’t get more than about 35% of the vote in any of them.

The middle third counties by white percentage of the population have about 64% to 77% whites. Obama generally did better than Kerry here. Obama’s share of the vote varied from 27-45% in these counties except for Clarke county (65%) which contains Athens and the University of Georgia.

In the bottom third counties, the white percentage is 18-64% and Obama did very well here.

Let’s look at Obama’s share of the vote in each county plotted against the percentage of whites and blacks in that county.

The red line in both graphs is the least squares fit. As is obvious, Obama’s share of the vote decreases as the percentage of whites increases in a county.

In the previous two graphs, we looked at Obama’s share of the total vote. So we cannot completely tease out the effects of a large African American turnout or the how the white voters voted in each county. Since we can’t have the numbers for Obama’s share of the white vote in each county, we’ll make some simplifying assumptions to guesstimate it:

1. The African American turnout in each county was the same as the total voter turnout in that county. This is approximately true at the state level, but could be wrong for some counties.
2. 98% of the African American voters voted for Obama. This is the percentage at the state level.
3. The number of voters who are not African American or White is small enough (5%) that we can approximate the white vote share by simply excluding the African American vote.

We know this procedure gives us only a guesstimate of the nonblack vote since in one small county (Clay) this results in Obama getting -1.85% of the nonblack vote. In the other 158 counties, Obama’s share of the nonblack vote varies from 4.4% (Randolph county) to 54.6% (Dekalb county).

The red lines in both graphs are LOESS fits.

The first thing apparent in these two graphs is that Obama did particularly well among whites in most of the populous counties as they show up outliers at the top. Among the other counties, there is not a significant pattern, but it does look like Obama’s nonblack vote share is lowest in counties where African American population is in the 20-30% range.

Razib did a similar analysis of racial polarization in Mississippi.

Charles Franklin analyzed the white vote for Obama at the state level. Nate Silver saw that data and noticed that most of the states where Obama performed worse than Kerry among whites were those where Obama did not campaign.

Andrew Gellman, at his must-read blog Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State, looked at Obama’s vote share divided by race in the West, Northeast, South and Midwest. He also showed the estimated nonblack vote by county for all of the US.

Andrew Gellman also looked at the voting preferences of rich and poor voters in both red and blue states in the 2008 election, something which is the topic of his book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do.

Finally, Michael McDonald estimates the voter turnout from the vote eligible population.

My revised national turnout rate for those eligible to vote is 61.6% or 131.3 million ballots cast for president. This number does not include an approximate 1.4 million under and over votes, for an estimated total 132.7 million total ballots cast. This represents an increase of 1.5 percentage points over the 60.1% turnout rate of 2004, but falls short of the 1968 turnout rate of 62.5%.

His estimate of turnout for Georgia is 61.1%, up from 56.2% in 2004.

Next: An analysis of the precincts in Alpharetta, Milton and Atlanta where our team worked.

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This is the first in a series of posts looking at the Presidential election results in the state of Georgia.

Let’s start with the top line numbers from the last three Presidential elections:

In 2000, Al Gore lost Georgia by 11.8 points and Kerry lost by 16.6 points. Obama has reduced that to 5.2 points, which is a swing of 11.4 percent from 2004. This swing is greater than the national swing of 9.2%.

Let’s look at the Georgia exit polls from 2000, 2004 and 2008.

During the last 8 years, the composition of the voters has changed a lot. The table below shows the percentage of voters who belonged to a specific race or ethnic group.

That’s quite a change in voter demographics, Compare that to the census estimate of population (in 2006) of 58.9% non-Hispanic whites, 29.9% African Americans and 7.5% Hispanics. This shows that African Americans, probably for the first time in Georgia history, voted in proportion of their population. The credit for that goes to the Obama campaign’s voter registration and Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) efforts.

Turnout this year was a little lower than 2004, mostly because of the high turnout among whites in 2004.

Since I am estimating White and African American turnout in 2008 from the exit polls, it might be prone to some error. We’ll know more when all the detailed data is released by the Georgia Secretary of State.

If African American turnout could be higher, Obama might have gotten closer by at most 1 point. However, do remember that in absolute numbers 41% more African Americans voted this year compared to 2004. The increase in the number of white voters was less than 9%.

The next table shows why Obama lost. It tells us what portion of whites and blacks voted for the Democratic Presidential candidate in the last three elections.

Obama needed around 27% or more of the white vote. However, he got the same proportion as Kerry.

Looking at voter groups, 37% of all voters (i.e. 57% of white voters) were white evangelicals. Obama got only 10% among them. Since he got 23% among all whites, so Obama got 40% of the white non-evangelical vote. Compare to Kerry who got 16% of white evangelical vote and 30% of white non-evangelical vote. Also, compare nationally where Obama got 43% of the white vote and 24% of white evangelical voters, i.e. Obama got a majority (53%) of non-evangelical white vote nationally.

Young voters nationally flocked to Obama in this election, a lot more than in recent elections. This can be seen in the graphs here.

The low number (20%) for 18-29 year old white voters in Georgia surprised me a lot. It shows how difficult it might be for Democrats to win Georgia even in the future.

Nationally, Obama did somewhat better with white voters than Kerry in 2004. However, there were regional variations. In Appalachia and parts of the South, Obama got a smaller percentage of the white vote than Kerry did.

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

The increased turnout in the South’s so-called Black Belt, or old plantation-country counties, was visible in the results, but it generally could not make up for the solid white support for Mr. McCain. Alabama, for example, experienced a heavy black turnout and voted slightly more Democratic than in 2004, but the state over all gave 60 percent of its vote to Mr. McCain. (Arkansas, however, doubled the margin of victory it gave to the Republican over 2004.)

Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally.

Do look at this table and a map of the US showing county-level electoral shifts.

MSNBC First Read gives the details of Obama vote share among whites.

In 13 [states], Obama received less than 35% of the white vote. His three lowest performing states: Alabama (10%), Mississippi (11%), and Louisiana (14%). The other 10: GA (23%), SC (26%), TX (26%), OK (29%), AR (30%), UT (31%), AK (32%), WY (32%), ID (33%), and TN (34%). On the other hand, Obama won the white vote in 18 states and DC: CA, CO, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, IA, ME, MA, MI, MN. NH. NY. OR, RI, WA, WI and VT. Obama’s lowest percentage of the white vote he received in a state that he won: NC (35%). The highest percentage of the white vote Obama received in a state he lost: MT (45%).

Razib has a few maps showing Obama’s performance among white voters in all the states compared to Kerry’s performance in 2004 as well as to the national average for white voters this year.

Pollster shows that in states with higher than about 20-25% of African American population, Obama performed poorly among white voters.

If you are interested in comparing Democratic or Republican performance over the years in Presidential elections in Georgia, Dave Leip’s Atlas of US Presidential elections has the historical results in a convenient table format.

All things considered, Barack Obama did very well in Georgia. I was always skeptical about the Democrats winning Georgia, except in a national landslide. How well did the Obama campaign bigwigs think they could do in Georgia can be gauged from this anecdote from August 27.

[Obama’s election manager David Plouffe] said that the campaign’s target in Georgia is about 47% of the vote, owing to Ex-Rep. Bob Barr’s ability to siphon votes away from John McCain.

In the end, Bob Barr didn’t do well at all, but Obama got his 47% of the vote. It looks to me like the Obama campaign knew what it was doing. Do you remember the Obama spreadsheet that leaked just after Super Tuesday and was remarkably accurate about the primary results?

There’s a lot more I want to analyze, including county and precinct level data, precincts in which our team worked. So tune in for more analysis and rambling soon.

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