Carne Asada con Obama

That is a picture of the signage at an extremely popular (and very good) taqueria in my neighborhood in Chicago. They have a conspicuously large sign which is visible from a major intersection and is probably worth a couple thousand bucks a month in advertising impressions, and have decided to devote roughly the bottom third of it to a homemade testament to Barack Obama.

Not that this anecdote should mean very much in the larger scheme of things. Obama barely carried my home district, the ridiculously gerrymanderd, Hispanic-majority IL-4, in the Illinois primary in February.

The Latino experience in America is primarily still an immigrant experience, and immigration boomed in the 1990s when the Clintons were in office. A lot of Hispanics who are now becoming citizens, or who are now registering to vote for the first time, came to America then, or had friends and family who did.

But I've been saying for a long time that one should not confuse the outpouring of support among Latinos for Hillary Clinton in the primaries with a lack of support for Barack Obama in the general election. Voting is intrinsically relativistic. I've made this comparison before, but would Hillary Clinton be regarded as running strong among Catholics if her opponent were John F. Kennedy?

I mention this because a couple of national polls -- the new NBC-WSJ survey as well as Gallup's extensive May tracking data -- now show Obama with roughly a 2:1 lead among Hispanic voters. Exit polls had John Kerry winning Hispanics by only about 55-45 in 2004 (although that figure is disputed), so this is a gain the Democrats are making right at the same time that Latinos begin to vote in much greater numbers.

One saving grace for McCain: Hispanics do not vote monolithically. Mexican Americans vote differently from Puerto Rican Americans from Cuban Americans. And so we should not necessarily assume that Obama's numbers are going to improve among Cuban voters in Florida.

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Today's Polls, 5/17

In New Mexico, Rasmussen has Barack Obama leading John McCain by 9 points, and Hillary Clinton leading him by 6.

This is the kind of purple-state result that Obama will need more of if he's going to improve on his electoral math. It also underscores that while Hispanics might not quite be the strength for Obama that they are for Hillary Clinton, they are nevertheless an electoral asset for him, and quite probably more of an asset for him than they were for John Kerry.

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Q&A; on Minority Turnout Model

There were several good questions on today's analysis of Obama's minority turnout scenarios, so let me extract a couple of those here.

Q. I am curious why you use census estimates of turnout (which are self-reports) instead of exit poll estimates of turnout (which vary substantially across states). Might not matter much.

We played around with both, and we made a decision to use the Census Bureau numbers as those results have somewhat larger sample sizes in all but a couple of states. The self-reporting might be a bit of an issue, but then again, we've seen plenty of problems in the past couple of cycles with the way that exit polls determine their samples as well.

Q. The main problems I see with your analysis that should be considered is (1) white/Anglo counter-mobilization; and (2) diminishing returns. While the Republicans are unpopular now, the election will not occur in a vacuum, and there likely will be some countermobilization among whites and Anglos (everyone is energized now, and you are assuming the black + latino voters increase but not that white/Anglo turnout is higher). I could see this mattering in a state like Texas, which has a history of white countermobilization to increasing black registration.

I've actually seen some academic work that the presence of a black candidate on the ticket tends to increase black turnout -- but also tends to increase white turnout. So you may be on to something there. At the same time, the white conservative vote was pretty darn mobilized in 2004, and I'm not sure I see the same thing happening this year at a time when the incumbent, Republican president is extremely unpopular, and when John McCain is not particularly well liked by elements of that conservative base.

I still think the most instructive piece of evidence are the turnout figures from the Democratic primaries. Turnout among these groups has not just increased in absolute terms -- everyone's turnout has increased in absolute terms. It has also increased in relative terms; slightly so for black voters, and very substantially so for Latinos and young voters.

Q. Are there any newer estimates of population by race & ethnicity (w/ a voter screen) than 2004 CPS that would be helpful to estimate 08 turnout rates?

Yes, the Census Bureau puts out estimates of the racial composition of each state every year, but the differences only amount to a percentage point here and there. I think you guys may be overestimating the level of precision that I'm aiming for with this analysis. Unlike some of the other stuff I do here, this is not necessarily meant to be predictive. I'm not necessarily saying there will be big increases in turnout among these groups. Instead, it's meant to be illustrative of how the map would change if Obama did get higher turnout from these groups. The whole thing is kind of in the conditional tense.

Q. What accounts for black turnout decreasing in NY, MS, FL, CA, & OK between '04 and '08? Is it just population change?

It might just be random noise. However, in three of these states (NY, OK, FL), Obama made only a half-hearted effort to compete. In California, there was a huge surge in Latino turnout that swamped everything else. In Mississippi -- I'm not sure. Obama actually spent very little time on the ground there -- just a day of campaigning, I think -- and there was a pretty large Republican crossover vote.

Q. Do these estimates account for cases in which the young voter might also be African-American or Latino? In other words is there some double counting going on?

The double counting thing is definitely something I was aware of, but I'm not sure that there's an elegant solution. Certainly with the Latino vote, for instance, there is a fairly big generational divide. If Obama turns out younger Latinos, that vote might go for him 70:30 or 75:25, whereas for older Latinos, the vote will probably be closer to 50:50. Nevertheless, some sort of adjustment is probably warranted. But I stated above, this analysis is intended more to be descriptive than predictive.

Q: Poblano - your analysis is getting to be way way too biased and losing its usefulness - you have to realize that it is very difficult for a democrat to get more than 50% of the vote, it has not happened since 1976.

Sure, but look how the electorate has changed since then. In 1976, just 2 percent of the electorate was Latino. That number was 8 percent in 2004 and will probably be at least 10 percent in 2008. Just 27 percent were college graduates in 1976, versus 42 percent in 2004. There are some trends that tend to favor the Republicans too, like the population getting older.

Q. If this could be real, it has huge implications for Obama's strategy. Should he tack right or tack left for the general?

As I've written before, Obama has two fundamental ways he can win. First, he can attempt to unifty and turn out the Democratic base. If he does that, he'll win based on the Democrats' party identification advantage, unless he gets absolutely killed with independents. Secondly, he could write off certain of those Reagan/Clinton Democrats, and instead make more of an appeal to the sort of the libertarian-leaning investor class, which makes up a pretty high fraction of the independent voting pool. The former strategy -- consolidating Democrats -- is certainly less of an uphill climb. The more confident the Obama campaign is that it *can* achieve increases in turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups, the more that looks like the right way to go.

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Black, Youth and Latino Turnout, and Obama's Electoral Map

This analysis is prepared in conjunction with Progress Illinois, which has posted a separate article on the findings. The Progress Illinois blog is relatively new to the scene -- just as mine is. But it's extremely well designed and extremely well written, and I hope that you'll get in the habit of checking it regularly. Thanks to Josh and the rest of the gang for their assistance.

As the Democratic primaries come to their slow, if increasingly certain conclusion, the media narrative has tended to focus on the alleged inadequacies of each candidate: Hillary Clinton's lack of support among black voters, or Barack Obama's supposed inability to resonate with certain types of white voters. What has been lost, however, is a story that could turn out to have far more relevance for the general election campaign in the fall: the emergence of a "big tent" Democratic electorate that has increasingly begun to reflect the full diversity of America.

What follows is a table comparing the composition of the Democratic primary electorate in 21 states in which exit polling data is available in both 2004 and 2008. We focus on three particular groups: black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. As a fraction of the Democratic electorate, African-American turnout has increased from 19.8 percent to 21.5 percent -- a 7.8 percent increase. Latino turnout has increased from 5.3 percent to 7.5 percent -- a 41.9 percent increase. And turnout among voters aged 18-29 has increased from 9.0 percent to 13.7 percent -- a 52.4 percent increase.



Today, we will examine the effects that increased turnout among these groups might have on Barack Obama's general election prospects against John McCain.

African-American Turnout

It is something of a myth that African-American voters do not turn out to vote. In 2004, 87.4 percent of registered African-Americans cast a ballot in the Presidential election, according to statistics compiled by the US Census Bureau. This compares with 89.4 percent turnout among registered, non-Hispanic whites. However, voter registration rates lag somewhat behind in the African-American community. As of 2004, 68.7 percent of African-American citizens aged 18+ were registered to vote, as compared with 75.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Thus, Barack Obama's 50-state voter registration drive, when coupled with the historical nature of his candidacy, could produce big dividends within this group.

What would be the electoral impact of an increase in African-American participation of 10 percent, 20 percent, or more? Fortunately, we have the perfect tool to examine such scenarios in the form of the FiveThirtyEight.com polling averages and simulation engine. Suppose that we start with a baseline assumption wherein total turnout in each state is equal to what it was in 2004, and that this turnout is divided between John McCain and Barack Obama according to their present standing in the FiveThirtyEight.com polling averages. This is probably fairly close to what most pollsters are assuming, as they lean heavily on statistics from the previous elections in establishing their turnout models.

We can infer the number of African-American voters in each state based on Census Bureau Data. For example, in North Carolina in 2004, there were approximately 3.5 million votes cast in the general election, and the Census Bureau estimates that 21.5 percent of these were from African-Americans. This equals about 750,000 votes. So, a 10 percent increase in African-American turnout would represent 75,000 additional African-American votes, a 20 percent increase 150,000 votes, and so forth. We distribute 94 percent of these new votes to Barack Obama and 6 percent to John McCain, in accord with Obama's present advantage over McCain among black voters in recent polling. We then re-run our simulations with the new votes added in. Obama's results at various levels of turnout improvement are below.



For each 10 percent increase in African-American turnout, Obama gains approximately 13 electoral votes, and 1 percent in his popular vote margin against John McCain. Even a 10 percent increase is enough to take him from a slight underdog against McCain to a slight favorite, while at higher levels of turnout improvement, Obama becomes the strong favorite. Meanwhile, Obama's electoral map changes as follows:



Generally speaking, there are two regions where Obama stands to benefit from higher African-American turnout. The first is in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and perhaps Indiana. Although there are not enormous numbers of African-Americans in these states, there are certainly some, and given how closely these states have tended to poll, even fractional improvements in Obama's numbers could produce large dividends. The other area where Obama can gain is along the southern Atlantic coast. North Carolina and Virginia would potentially be extremely competitive with higher black turnout, and to a lesser extent so would South Carolina, Florida, and perhaps Georgia. Louisiana might also become viable, although states like Mississippi and Alabama are unlikely to be.

Youth Turnout

We can run through the same analysis for youth turnout. Specifically, we will be focusing on voters aged 18-24. Turnout in this group has tended to lag badly behind that of older voters. In 2004, for instance, 46.7 percent of citizens aged 18-24 turned out to vote, as compared with 63.8 percent of the electorate as a whole. But these voters have become very engaged by the 2008 campaign, and it is not difficult to imagine a turnout increase of 25 or even 50 percent.

Most polling has shown Obama with a 3:2 or 2:1 advantage over John McCain among voters in the 18-29 age range. We will assume that Obama's advantage is slightly larger toward the younger end of this range (18-24) and assign him 70 percent of the new votes, with the balance going to John McCain. The resulting scenarios are below:



Unlike the African-American vote, which tends to be concentrated in certain regions, there is not that much difference in the number of young voters from state to state. However, some areas do warrant a mention. There is a strong tradition of youth turnout in the Upper Midwest, which could help Obama to ensure victories in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Alaska is an extremely young state and could become a swing state with higher youth turnout. Texas and Georgia are also quite young and could become competitive with a strong youth turnout coupled with an improvement in Hispanic and black turnout, respectively.


Latino Turnout

Because Hillary Clinton has tended to do better with Latinos in the primaries, there is a perception that this group is not a strength of Barack Obama's. In fact, however, Obama held leads over John McCain by margins of 57-33 and 51-41 among Hispanic voters in recent sets of Gallup polling. Increasing the share of the electorate that is Latino would definitely be to Obama's benefit -- albeit not quite to the same extent of the other two groups. We will assume that Obama gets 60 percent of any new Latino votes, and John McCain the other 40 percent. As just 44.1 percent of adult Latino citizens turned out to vote in 2004, improvement within this group could be comparatively easy to achieve.



Obama's popular vote share increases only fractionally as a result of new Latino votes. However, these votes tend to be concentrated in electorally significant states. In particular, an increase in Latino turnout could all but assure an Obama victory in New Mexico, while also improving his chances in Colorado and Nevada.

Because they have polled so closely, this group of three states is among the most important in the country. Assume that Obama starts with the states that John Kerry won in 2004, plus Iowa where he is currently favored, but minus New Hampshire where he is currently the underdog. This gets him to 254 electoral votes, whereas he needs 270 to win. Winning those three states would get him to 273 electoral votes, just getting him over that threshold. In other words, if Obama wins these states, he would probably not need to carry Ohio or Florida to win the election.



Putting it Together

Finally, we can run a couple of scenarios that combine the effects of turnout improvements among these different groups. The first scenario is what I call the "40/20 Plan": increasing youth (18-24) turnout by 40 percent, and African-American turnout by 20 percent, but not focusing specifically on Latinos. The second is the "40/30/20 Plan": aiming for a 40 percent increase in youth turnout, a 30 percent increase in Latino turnout, and a 20 percent increase in African-American turnout. The last is what I'm simply calling the "Best Case Scenario". This would be a 50 percent increase in youth turnout, a 50 percent increase in Latino turnout, and a 40 percent increase in African-American turnout. Although this latter scenario is unlikely to develop, it should help to provide some context for where a strong ground game could make the most difference for Obama.



As you can see, these effects are quite powerful when combined. The 40/20 Plan would gain Obama about 48 electoral votes, and improve his win percentage to 68.3 percent. Adding Latinos to this plan would improve his win percentage further to 71.7 percent. And under his best case turnout scenario, Obama becomes a prohibitive favorite to win the election, as states like Texas and Georgia could turn blue.



The ability to bring new voters to the polls remains Barack Obama's most significant electoral advantage, both relative to Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Indeed, current polling may already be underestimating Obama's strength against McCain if it does not account for improved turnout among Democratic-leaning groups like young voters and African-Americans, who have participated in record numbers in this year's primaries. If Obama can parlay that advantage with a strong ground game, he very much could redraw the electoral map.

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