A Tale of Two Electorates (Part IV)

Here Niall Stanage of The Hill tells us about two different data sets reporting on the ethnic makeup of the 2008 electorate.  The first and most often quoted is a set from 18,000 interviews by media polling organizations at the exit door of the polls presumably on election day.  The second is a set from 60,000 interviews by the Census Bureau, presumably weeks or months later.  About the first, note that election day voters were about 40% of the total in New Mexico in 2008, while regarding the second, voters memories are notoriously faulty.

Here are the two ethnic breakdowns compared:

                 White    Black    Hispanic
Media            74%      13%      9%
Census           76%      12%      7%

The margins of error for the sample means of white voters should be about 0.75% for the media exit poll and about 0.41% for the census poll.  That means that 95% of samples of 18,000 drawn the way the media organizations did would have fractions of white voters of 74% +/- 0.75%, while 95% of the samples of 60,000 drawn the way the Census did would have the white percentage in the range 76% +/- 0.41%.  Thus, these estimates are different, and are, in all probability, not from the same population, just as I noted above.

Though the differences are small, they are large enough to be critical in this close election; they give rise in Stanage's calculation to a one percentage point difference in two estimates for the national vote for President this year.

As Stanage details, the two campaigns have very different faiths in which electorate will show up this year.

Not surprisingly, I tend toward the Romney camp's view

It doesn't seem likely to me that the white turnout will be as low as it was in 2008, or that it will vote as Democratic as it did then, for all the reasons mentioned by Stanage.  For one thing, there is almost no evidence of Bush -- or Romney -- Derangement Syndrome among independents; one could even cite the Tea Party activism as evidence for the contrary effect.  And there is no longer any possibility of a financial panic driving the middle class into the arms of the progressivist central planners of both parties.

The youth vote seems certain to react poorly from the Obama campaign's point of view to the high unemployment among recent college graduating classes.  And upper income whites are less likely to turn out to support the first black President's second term than his historic first.

There seem to be at least two reasons why Hispanics won't turn out and vote for Obama in the percentages they did in 2008. First, the Catholic Church is, if not against the President then certainly not excitedly for him.  Second, his administration failed to carry through on any of his promises for comprehensive immigration reform.  No matter what Hispanics think of Romney's position on immigration, they can't be as optimistic about Obama's as they were in 2008.

We shall know what the total of all these effects is by early Wednesday morning, though the details will remain obscure for years, just as we can only see 2008 through a glass darkly.