Matt Yglesias

White Men Are Not Very Progressive

A nice map from dreaminonempty at Open Left illustrates the vote share won among white men in the 2008 presidential election:

The take home message: expanding voting rights – a progressive position – resulted in the ability to elect more liberal politicians.

I would say that another message is that progressive politics is badly disadvantaged by a situation in which the overwhelming majorities of political leaders and prominent media figures are white men. There are plenty of white men with progressive views, but in general the majority of white men are not progressive and the majority of progressives are not white men. Drawing from the relatively small pool of white male progressives means drawing from a shallow talent pool.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

Andrew Gelman runs the numbers and comes up with a new reason why Republicans may not care about alienating Hispanic voters by having their members of congress compare NCLR to the Ku Klux Klan. He takes a look at what the 2008 electoral college would look like if we transferred half of John McCain’s Hispanic votes in each state to Barack Obama:

Basically . . . not much happens. Missouri might tip to Obama.

That said, a presidential election is a zero-sum game. Given that McCain lost, in a sense any counterfactual scenario in which he gets fewer votes isn’t very different from a scenario in which he loses. I think the real question about alienating Hispanic voters is what kind of scenario can we envision in which the GOP captures the White House without retaking Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Nate Silver has the answer and dubs his map “Operation Gringo.”

Long story short, it can be done, but Republicans would have to start doing much better in the Rust Belt.

The Geezer Effect and Internet Politics

This isn’t really apropos of anything in particular, but over the weekend I was thinking about the fact that a lot of our perceptions about the medium-term implications of digital technology are probably skewed by the fact that, at the moment, there’s a significant generational gap in online activity:

For example, there’s also a significant generational gap in attitudes toward Barack Obama:

This means that at the moment there’s a substantial relationship between being online and attitudes toward Barack Obama. The online population, in other words, is a lot more Obamaphilic than the population as a whole.

This sort of thing has spurred a lot of admiring commentary about the efficacy of progressive internet tools, and some conservative interest in building conservative new media platforms leading to the present-day’s right-wing obsession with Twitter. But it seems very plausible that Obama’s popularity on the internet is driven by completely coincidental demographic factors—the senior citizen cohort contains more white people than does the generation population and white seniors have more conservative attitudes about a number of social issues than do white non-seniors—and the “success” of the online left is thus something of an illusion.