[Despite a mountain of evidence affirming the centrality of race
in US politics, it is essentially ignored in almost all electoral
analysis.]
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WHAT’S MISSING FROM VOTING DATA? RACE.  
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Steve Phillips
August 11, 2022
The Nation
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_ Despite a mountain of evidence affirming the centrality of race in
US politics, it is essentially ignored in almost all electoral
analysis. _

A volunteer cuts out stickers outside of a satellite polling station
in Philadelphia, Pa. , Mark Makela / Getty Images

 

“I don’t see race,” Stephen Colbert used to say. Since the
phrase was clearly a satirical device, he would regularly add punch
lines such as [[link removed]],
“People tell me I’m white, and I believe them because I just
devoted six minutes to explaining that I’m not a racist.” When it
comes to politics, however, many in the media and political
establishment also don’t see race, and the results are not so funny.
In fact, they’re deadly serious, in terms of their impact on who
controls this country and what direction it heads.

Racial identity is one of the most salient and predictive data points
that exist. Exit polling in presidential elections began in 1976, and
over the subsequent 44 years, voter behavior has diverged sharply
along racial lines, with 88 percent of African Americans backing the
Democratic presidential nominee and just 40 percent of whites siding
with the Democrats.

 

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Yet, despite this mountain of evidence affirming the centrality of
race in US politics, it is essentially ignored in almost all electoral
analysis, projections, strategy, and planning. Perhaps most notable is
the invisibility of race at Nate Silver’s
website, _FiveThirtyEight_, which has established a reputation as a
go-to resource for data-driven forecasts about electoral outcomes. It
describes its mission as using “data and evidence to advance public
knowledge.”

In Silver’s 4,749-word description
[[link removed]] of
his methodology of modeling and forecasting, there is just one passing
reference to racial demographics. _FiveThirtyEight_ makes available
on Github [[link removed]] nearly 200
underlying data sets that inform its work. The array of data is vast
and sprawling, spanning pollster ratings, congressional election
forecasts over the past several years, and, among other things,
a statistical analysis
[[link removed]] of
381 paintings featured in the Bob Ross show, _The Joy of
Painting_ (56 percent of the paintings contained a “deciduous
tree”). But nothing on racial demographics and how they affect
election outcomes

_The Cook Political Report_, to its credit, does make available to its
subscribers race-specific data on individual congressional districts,
and Dave Wasserman often expresses awareness
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dynamics in his commentary about various races, but _Cook_’s
benchmark Partisan Voting Index
[[link removed]] (PVI) is decidedly
race-neutral.

It’s not just journalists and pundits who ignore racial data. Many
top Democratic strategists and leaders also fail, to their own
detriment, to look at the electorate in living color. In the first
half of 2020, the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC spent nearly
$8 million in Iowa [[link removed]], a
state where just 8 percent of the voters are people of color. It
allocated nothing to Georgia, where whites are just 51 percent of the
population, and where Democrat Stacey Abrams had come much closer to
winning in 2018 than the Iowa gubernatorial candidate did in the same
year. Similarly, the Biden presidential campaign made minimal
investment in Georgia, leading Biden to marvel on election night
[[link removed]], “We’re still in the
game in Georgia, although that’s not one we expected.”

In an electorate with a cavernous racial vote gap, failing to account
for that gap leads to distorted and inaccurate analyses. Specifically,
it often paints a picture of a voting population that is whiter—and
more conservative—than what it really is. For example, _The Cook
Political Report_ rated now–US Senator Raphael Warnock’s contest
as “Lean Republican
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less than a month before the November election. What happened in
Georgia is that the analysts and strategists overlooked and
underestimated the electoral significance of the voter turnout
operation that Abrams had been building for a decade as a way to
reduce and ultimately eliminate the racial vote gap in a state
undergoing a demographic revolution. Since African Americans vote
overwhelmingly for Democrats, applying a race-conscious lens to the
Peach State’s electoral battles would have revealed that the
contests were much more competitive than most analysts believed.

Given the enormous stakes of the midterm elections, there is little
margin for error in assessing the competitiveness of congressional
races and making smart decisions about strategy and spending over the
next 12 weeks. That’s why I have spent the past several months
working with a team of talented data scientists to develop the New
Majority Index [[link removed]]—the
first election rating system to specifically incorporate racial
demographic data in assessing and rating how competitive a given
district is. In addition to the data points that PVI uses—past
election results compared to the national average—the NMI goes
further and deeper by analyzing a district’s racial diversity and
the racial gap in voter turnout among its respective demographic
groups (the full methodology of the NMI is described here
[[link removed]]).

When the additional racial data points are factored in, the picture
that emerges is more complete and less dire in terms of Democrats’
prospects for retaining their majority in the House. _The Cook
Political Report_ identifies 26 Democratic-held seats as vulnerable,
versus just seven Republican-held seats. The NMI, by contrast, shows
11 Democratic seats are most in peril, and 22 Republican seats that
could be flipped by addressing the racial voter turnout gap.

Conventional wisdom about the midterm elections misses the mark
because it is based on the entirely incorrect premise that the
electorate consists of one undifferentiated mass of people—“the
voters”—whose political allegiances are buffeted back and forth
between the political parties by macro-environmental factors such as
inflation and gas prices. Voter behavior differs dramatically by
racial group, however, and omitting the data on the racial composition
of the electorate leads to incomplete and often inaccurate electoral
predictions. The data is there for the analyzing. It’s high time
that we retire the notion that there is virtue in “not seeing
race.” If we want to understand and have an impact on elections, we
need to open our eyes to the racial realities of American politics.

_STEVE PHILLIPS is the host of Democracy in Color with Steve
Phillips, a color-conscious podcast about politics. He is a senior
fellow at the Center for American Progress and is the author of Brown
Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New
American Majority. He is a regular contributor to The Nation._

_Copyright c 2022 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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