Category Archive

“African Americans” is a trending topic on Twitter right now, thanks in large part to tweets repeating the claim that only 4.7% (or, in some tweets, 4% or 5% or 10%) of blacks bothered to vote yesterday.

But it’s not true. None of it is anywhere close to true.

The real number is about 34%.

Official stats on voting by race aren’t kept, but from exit polls, vote totals, and census information, you can estimate this stuff pretty well. About 38% of the voting age population of the United States turned out to vote in yesterday’s election. There are about 26.5 million African Americans of voting age in the United States. According to exit poll data, blacks made up about 10% of the total electorate this year. About 90 million people voted in this election, and if 10% of them were black, that makes 9 million. Nine million is 34% of 26.5 million.

In other words, about a third of black adults voted this year, a percentage that’s only slightly lower than the population as a whole.

So where did the 4.7% thing come from? A tweet posted yesterday evening seems to be the source. That tweet, as you can see, is only about Wisconsin, and the guy who tweeted it later clarified that he was only referring to Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District.

But even that doesn’t make any sense, for a bunch of reasons. But it turns out that Wisconsin’s population is about 6% black, which means that if blacks in Wisconsin were voting at slightly lower numbers than whites, they could easily make up about 4.7% of the total vote in the state.

I can’t prove it yet, but I’m betting someone posted that stat somewhere, someone else misread it, and that’s how this whole thing got started.

James C. Russell is a perennial candidate for Congress in Westchester, NY, a suburb of New York City. After running and losing in three Republican primaries in a row, he managed to win the GOP nomination to take on Democratic incumbent Nita Lowey in New York’s 18th CD in 2008. He lost that race in a landslide, but came back to get the nomination again this year.

It’s a standard story in lopsided districts, and was never one that drew — or deserved — much attention. Until this September.

That was when the news broke that back in 2001 Russell had written an essay in which he described school integration as a conscious plot to foster race-mixing in America. Specifically, he wrote, the integration of schools was an effort to undermine “appropriate ethnic boundaries” in the sexual preferences of “white pre-adolescent girls and adolescent young women.” That plot, he said, was buttressed by efforts by “media moguls” to “deliberately popularize miscegenation” in movies targeted toward teens and pre-teens.

Russell’s views were repeatedly denounced in local media and in blogs from coast to coast. The state Democratic Party attacked him in the strongest possible language, while the Republicans quickly repudiated him, trying — and failing — to get him off the ballot entirely.

Yesterday Jim Russell picked up 38% of the vote in the 18th, improving his 2008 performance by six points.

Sheesh.

So what happened with the youth vote in 2010?

Well, you can expect to see a lot of this in the coming days:

The youth vote was a bust for the Democratic Party this year. Young voters plummeted as a share of the electorate and support for the Democrats declined. Where young voters went for Obama by a two-to-one margin, barely more than half supported his party yesterday. Young voters made up just 11% of those casting ballots. Obamamania was a fad, and it’s over.

On the other hand…

Young voters were the only age cohort to support the Democratic party yesterday, and though their support for the Dems did decline, it declined less than any other age group’s. Between 2006 and 2010 over-65 voters’ support for the Dems dropped by nine points, 45-64 year olds’ dropped by seven, and 30-44 year olds’ dropped by six. But the proportion of young voters supporting the party dropped by just four points — from 60% to 56% — and their support for the GOP rose by just two points.

Young voters were the only age cohort to support the Democrats this cycle — as noted above, 56% of them cast their votes for that party. No other age group gave more than 47% of their votes to the Dems, and seniors went for the GOP by a 58-40 margin after narrowly supporting the Democrats in the 2006 elections.

Young voters’ turnout as a share of the national electorate stayed pretty much stable when compared with four years ago — the figures I’ve seen suggest that it dropped from 12% to 11%, but given the way the numbers are counted, that may just be statistical noise. (Also, I haven’t seen any national turnout numbers yet, but if voting was up across the board then the youth vote could have risen considerably while not showing any increase as a proportion of the whole. I’ll update when I get that data.)

Turnout is lower for midterm elections than it is in election years. That’s true for every demographic, but the dropoff is particularly steep for youth voters. That’s always been the case, and it likely always will be. Old people vote in the midterms and young people (including people in their thirties and forties) don’t. Also, youth support for Obama in 2008 was so intense that a regression toward the mean was inevitable.

So no, young voters didn’t save the Democratic party yesterday. (Given the way the party has treated them for the last two years, it would have been shocking if they had.) But yesterday could have been a lot worse for the Dems, and if young people had stayed home, or voted in line with the way that older voters did, it would have been.

Update | While I was working on this piece, the Washington Post put up a story on the youth vote that followed the script I warned about above pretty much to the letter. It’ll be the first of many.

“If no one out there understands, start your own revolution and cut out the middleman.”

–Billy Bragg

I’ve heard several reports of student voters being challenged or turned away from the polls today, and a quick Google is turning up more. I’ll be collecting those stories and links here as the evening rolls on.

If you’ve got word of something I’ve missed, let me know.

CONNECTICUT | Three student voters from U Conn were challenged by “unofficial election checkers” deployed by the Republican Party to a local polling place, according to a district election official. All three challenges were rejected.

IOWA | Students at Central College were turned away from the polls when election officials refused to accept their dormitory housing contracts or college directory listings as proof of residency.

MICHIGAN | Reports say that students at the University of Michigan and Michigan State were turned away from the polls because the state had “automatically changed their addresses to match their driver’s licenses instead of their University of Michigan address.” More on the Michigan situation here.

SOUTH CAROLINA | The state Democratic Party says that self-described Tea Party activists harassed student voters this morning at Benedict College, a historically black institution in Columbia, SC. Other reports from Benedict indicate that student voters there were challenged and forced to submit provisional ballots.

VIRGINIA | Someone allegedly broke into Representative Tom Perriello’s campaign offices early this morning and tampered with door hangers meant for distribution at the University of Virginia, mixing up packets so that students would be directed to the wrong polling places. The campaign discovered the sabotage before noon, but many of the materials had already been distributed by then. (Perriello lost his re-election battle by a slim margin.)