Comments on: Nate Silver at 538: Black voters are NOT to blame for Prop 8

By: Man Who Donated $125,000 to Prop 8 is divorcing wife - Politics and Other Controversies - City-Data Forum

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:39:42 +0000

[...] grow so will the fight against gay marriage. They are the ones that stopped it in CA, not money. Nate Silver at 538: Black voters are NOT to blame for Prop 8 | Train Wreck Politics Poll: Black Voters Not to Blame for California

By: Man Who Donated $125,000 to Prop 8 is divorcing wife - Politics and Other Controversies - City-Data Forum

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:27:16 +0000

By: Lisa

Lisa — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:35:12 +0000

Their should be no differences on the basis of colour each and every person should have the right to vote. This will result in a true democratic country. Lisa colorado drug rehab

By: brook

brook — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:56:32 +0000

Black votes will definitely change the poll result.

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Brook

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By: Griffin

Griffin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:27:29 +0000

Susan,
Silver isn’t interchanging the numbers of young Latino voters for young black ones. He’s saying that if you know the percentage of young voters of all races who voted against Prop 8, and if you know the percentage of young white and young Latino voters who voted against Prop 8 (and we do), then you can approximate the percentage of young black voters who voted against it, which is what Silver did.

His guess is that they split about even. My math says young black and “other” voters, which made up about 4% of the California electorate, voted against Prop 8 at a rate of about 52%.

There’s no way to know how much of that 52% is just young black voters– and again, exit polls have notoriously high margins of error, especially once you start getting into these small slices of the electorate– but my guess, like Silver’s, is that they most likely split about even.

So nobody is substituting one data point for another here, and certainly no one is being “racist.” It’s called mathematics. It’s like looking at a puzzle that is missing one piece. You can guess what the missing piece looks like by observing the shape of the hole.

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:33:18 +0000

Do you know how to read? The article says that no data exists for young black voters. Klein takes the data from young Latino voters and assumes that young black voters voted the same way. These groups are not interchangeable.

53% of Latinos voted for Prop 8.

70% of black voters voted for it.

Those numbers aren’t even close, so I’m not buying this argument.

It’s bad enough to treat people as units instead of individuals, but to substitute one unit for another just to make a point you have no data to prove is not only ridiculous, but racist.

It’s sad the way even educated white people see all non-white people as some amorphous unit.