My friend Rob sent me the article “Eric Oliver on the Bigot Belt” from The Freakonomics Blog. In this post, the author looks at Republic Counties that went more red in 2008 compared to 2004, a trend that is frequently cited as being due to racism (an issue that some of the posts on this blog have discussed).

Erik Oliver, a professor at the University of Chicago, argues that ”the best predictor of a county’s Republican vote margin is its white racial percentage relative to its state’s black population size. In other words, the counties where Republican margins grew the largest tended to be predominantly white places in otherwise racially mixed states.”

The author links increased Republic voting to racist attitudes, but not in what we usually think of as the usual picture of racists featuring “poverty, low education, and rural residence underlie white racial animosity.” Instead, racism only leads to higher Republic voting in a very particular context:

“These patterns are consistent with research on individual racial attitudes. Historically, the greatest levels of racial violence occurred within white enclaves near larger black populations, particularly when these enclaves are poor and uneducated. Even today, whites who live in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods within more diverse metropolitan areas tend to be more racially hostile than whites who live in either integrated neighborhoods or within largely white regions.”

This theory of racism by juxtaposition and segregation is food for thought, Panhandler readers.

Check out some of the comments on the original post, people get really intense.

The guys over at the blog Strange Maps have come up with a great display demonstrating a modern effect of slavery on the contemporary US.  Check out these two maps, one detailing 2008 voting patterns, and the other detailing 1860 cotton production (bluer areas represent voting Democrat, redder areas Republican):

Cotton and Voting

And now a juxtaposition of the two:

Strange Map Overlay

The maps kind of speak for themselves, but what is most interesting is the extent of the geographic correlation.  Furthermore, turning to the Panhandle, one can see suggestive evidence for why the Tallahassee area tends to vote more Democratic.

I was sent an article in today’s New York Times (I know, NOT a Southern paper) describing potential ramifications of the Southern voting patterns we’ve been talking about here at The Panhandler’s Guide. Assuming a normal amount of political backlash, the article reads:

“What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCainover Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say . . .

. . .Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say. . .

“Merle Black, an expert on the region’s politics at Emory University in Atlanta, said theRepublican Party went too far in appealing to the South, alienating voters elsewhere.”

As we’ve pointed out on this blog before, the question of race always goes hand-in-hand with analyses of voting in the South. One thing I think is interesting, bases on my research regarding race, is how the authors note the 5% increase in white voter support for McCain compared to Bush, yet what if it had been a 2% increase, or 10%? How much of an increase is needed to constitute the implied proof of growing racism? More importantly, how much did religious intolerance play into this increase in white pro-McCain voters? The article give a revealing quote: “I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.” I think this is a research project in need of pursuit: religious versus racial fears in the South.

To read the whole article, click here.

Almost a year ago, I broke one of those simple yet insightful maxims of daily life I learned growing up in the South: don’t discuss religion or politics over dinner. I was eating with my parents back in Live Oak, and the issue of the upcoming election came up. We discussed the nominees for both the Republicans and the Democrats, and my father ventured a guess that I was to hear over and over the following year, all across the country: “People around here just aren’t going to vote for a black man.” He pointed towards the forested land we lived on, and said “People in Live Oak aren’t going to feel comfortable, and I’m not saying it’s right, but if Obama gets the nomination there’s no way he can win.”

While the immediate conversation devolved into a series of half-cocked assertions on both sides, more cool-headed reflections surface in the following months. Would people really not vote for a black man in this day and age? If so, by how much? And would this be especially strong in the South? How much does race predict voting patterns in a bi-racial election?

It turns out this is a well-known question, coined alternately the “Bradley Effect” or the “Wilder Effect.” These terms refer to the situation where voters do not voice racial bias to pollsters and so election-day results are significantly lower for black, or other minority, candidates. A recent paper out of Harvard University analyzes 133 races for state governor, and finds that there was a “Wilder Effect” but that it disappeared. The author argues that racially-charged issues in a specific period created the effect, and once this context changed, the effect went away: “the prominence of racialized issues such as crime and welfare declined markedly at the national level in the late 1990s and early 2000s” (7). The author uses data from the Clinton-Obama primary match-up, and finds that Obama actually did better than polls indicated, not worse.

Click to read more…