Nate Silver: Does race affect votes? | Hacker News Reader

Nate Silver: Does race affect votes?

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Why is it ok for black people to vote for Obama because he is black? Isn't that equally racist?

You know that the Democratic party lost the south because of race? I mean, Strom Thurmond, of all people, used to be a Democrat.

And Obama didn't lock up the black vote until white Iowans voted for him. Hillary was winning the national black vote 2-1 until after he won the caucuses. The evidence is pretty clear that black people don't just blindly vote for other black people - they vote in their self-interest, and until Obama seemed credible, their self-interest was to vote for Hillary.

So given two credible candidates, they would vote based on race. This makes sense as it is based on self-interest.

But one can make a similar self-interest argument for white people voting based on race also.

The question is when does self-interest turn into racism and whether the notion of racism even applies to voting.

Isn't that a straightforward question? Self-interest turns into racism when the candidate voted for is not the best candidate. If you vote for an inferior candidate on the basis of race, then you are not acting on your own self-interest. I use the terms "best" and "inferior" to refer to the candidate's benefits to the specific voter.

The parties flipped. Blacks were heavy Republican voters due to Lincoln until the 1950s when it started to shift. Edward Brooke, the first black US Senator since Reconstruction was a Massachusetts Republican.

Things didn't really shift until the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s were passed, coupled with Great Society programs of Johnson, that put blacks in the Democratic camp for good and sent Dixiecrats to the GOP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

On a moral level it's equally bad, but on a social level it's less bad. The reason being that there are fewer black voters than white voters, so the effect of racist black voters on the election is much less. If all of our elections were decided by black people voting for bad candidates because they were black then you'd probably hear a lot more about it.

If all of our elections were decided by black people voting for bad candidates because they were black then you'd probably hear a lot more about it.

That's exactly what happened in a bunch of major cities ( Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Washington DC ), and a major reason why those cities are in such bad shape. Read about Coleman Young for a taste of this history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleman_Young

oops, I meant to say presidential elections, sorry. You are correct though.

Interestingly, if there are more racist white voters than racist black voters, the racist black voters actually improve the quality of the decision because each racist black vote cancels out a racist white vote. This makes the best candidate more likely to win the election, because the best candidate has fewer votes to make up. (Unless the racism helps them, in which case it doesn't matter.)

What does "quality of the decision" mean? Does that concept even apply to a democracy?

If you are going to define the best decision as the decision made by the majority, then no. But let's say for the sake of argument that one leader can be better than another independent of the decision made by the majority.

Let's create a model to look at how this works. Say there are 30 voters. 6 of those voters are racist; 4 only vote for whites, 2 only vote for blacks. Of the remaining 24, all try to vote for the best candidate, but are only able to successfully determine the best candidate 52% of the time.

So there are 24 voters trying to choose the best candidate.

Without the racist black voters, the black candidate starts out at -4 votes.

With the racist black voters, the black candidate starts out at -2 votes.

With or without the racist black voters, each candidate needs 16 votes total to win. (A simple majority of the original 30.) Now let's assume the black and white candidates are equally likely to be the "best" candidate. Given that a voter trying to choose rationally is likely to choose correctly 52% of the time, we can see that the system with the racist black voters would choose the correct candidate a much higher percentage of the time if we were to run the simulation 10,000 times.

edit: I actually tried this in excel, and the results were quite interesting. 52% is way too low though, rather try 60% instead. What we see is that without racist black people, the best candidate essentially never wins.

Using your reasoning, wouldn't it also make sense for non-racists (of any race) to vote for the minority candidate not because he/she is better but rather to combat the racism of the majority?

My reasoning was descriptive, not prescriptive.

So a white racist vote = 'bad decision' but a black racist vote = 'less bad decision'?

Nah, white racist vote = bad decision in one direction, black racist vote = bad decision in the opposite direction. If – in a two party system – there are about the same on both sides those bad decisions cancel each other out.

Bad decision in the sense that race played a role where it shouldn’t. This works only in two-party systems like in the US.

Corrupt mayors aren't the only reasons those cities languished. You lose banks, big box retailers at a time when people still shopped at them and have a rise in crime due to all of the jobs being shipped to the suburbs and your cities would go to hell in a handbasket too.

Corrupt mayors didn't help, but let's not act as if this was some sort of problem that was borne solely out of poor management.

People left the cities because of the rise in crime. Crime can always be prevented by a reasonably effective government. Read this book to get a sense of what happened in Brooklyn: http://www.amazon.com/Canarsie-Italians-Brooklyn-Against-Lib... The same story was repeating itself across the country.

It's racist but that doesn't mean it's not ok, like affirmative action.

I think it's more an issue of voting for one's self-interest, rather than say, voting for a particular race. It's why for instance, GOP Chair Michael Steele didn't win a senate race in Maryland over a white candidate.

It's not so much about voting for race, as much as it's voting for a candidate that is more likely to understand your experience and as a result, will be "thinking of you" as he or she makes decisions.

It explains why so few minorities (Specifically, blacks) have made it to the Senate since Reconstruction.

I guess I'll tell a story about what I had hoped would be the condition of the world today. I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.

One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.

It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.

One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking.

It's quite disappointing to me that there are still as many Americans as there are who classify their fellow human beings into Procrustean beds of "race" categories, especially now that it is known that human races have essentially nil biological significance. But it is progress that the United States has elected a President who has traceable African ancestry and "black" appearance. My late father said back in the 1990s, when Colin Powell was mulling a run for President, that it would be a good idea for America to elect a black president to begin to get over this issue. Even after Obama's election, I still saw ridiculous commentary such as the statement that Obama is the first President not of northern European ancestry--completely neglecting his ancestry through his mother, Ann Dunham. Maybe someday we will get used to the idea of viewing our fellow human beings as our fellow human beings, period, but I'm appalled that it is taking so long.

>"especially now that it is known that human races have essentially nil biological significance"

Citation? Your doctor isn't going to screen you for sickle cell if you're white.

As far as I know, race correlates with genetic isolation of ancestral groups, and there are differences between races.

Researchers looking for genetic diseases are careful to choose a mixture of races in their control sample.

I agree that people shouldn't be treated differently in civil society based on their race, and who doesn't? But they should certainly be treated differently based on their race by their doctors.

Race may become less significant in the future if more genetic mixture occurs with globalization. But for now, to say it has no biological significance sounds like wishful thinking.

Edit: I make some stronger claims here than I was ready to defend specifically with citations and literature. I overstate my case. However, to the extent of my current knowledge, you can tell where someone's ancestors came from solely by looking at their DNA, and I know that some diseases are more prevalent in people with certain ancestry. That suggests to me that there are distinct genetic lineages in the human population. As far as I know, "race is biologically meaningless" is a stretch.

However, it is true that the popular social conception of race is very different from any biologically defensible conception thereof. For example, a person with significant African ancestry in America is considered "black", even if that person also has significant ancestry from other places.

Saying that race is meaningless sounds to me like saying "there are no large phenotypically distinct subgroups in the human population". I think that is simply wrong.

Since "race" is such a socially charged word, perhaps it should be dropped and replaced with another word.

Your doctor isn't going to screen you for sickle cell if you're white.

Do italians, greeks, arabs, and other mediterreanean europeans count as white? Because doc should take a look at them too, I think:

http://www.emro.who.int/Publications/EMHJ/0506/09.htm

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/c...

Exceptions that prove the rule, because of historical migration and trade patterns that link those areas. Identical recurrent mutations in the human genome are rare.

Do you believe that if you took a mitochondrial DNA sample from an Indian, a Chinese person, a person of European descent, and an African living in America that a researcher would not be able to tell the difference?

Exceptions that prove the rule

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition=sicklecelldisease

Not sure, depends upon the specific case -- probably correct in a wide, stochastic sense.

Immaterial, though. I was merely refuting your incorrect statement in the GP.

Sickle cell anemia isn't somehow limited to black people:

http://www.sicklecellsociety.org/information/resrep/res14.ht...

Your doctor isn't going to screen you for sickle cell if you're white.

Another reply has already shown the error of thinking that the sickle cell trait is confined to populations identified as "white." It is not. What is your proposed definition of races on biological grounds, and what is your citation for a scientific consensus on that?

See

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Fruit-Sides-Wrong-Debate/dp/...

for citations to recent primary research literature backing up the statement that "race" as now construed in society has very little medical usefulness. The author is a neurobiologist.

I agree that race is a social construct to some degree. For example, in America a person is considered "black" if he has one parent of African ancestry and one parent of European ancestry. However, I am not sure that the idea that "race is biologically meaningless" is defensible. I hope it is. But I wonder what we tell ourselves if the evidence says that it's not.

I know you can tell where a person's ancestors recently came from based on their DNA, and that there are certainly distinct genetic lineages in the human population.

I am open to reading more literature and articles on the subject. I am merely stating that according to the extent of my current knowledge, the idea that "race is meaningless" is suspect.

"I agree that people shouldn't be treated differently in civil society based on their race, and who doesn't? But they should certainly be treated differently based on their race by their doctors."

Maybe they should be treated differently based on their specific disease-related alleles rather than a blunt instrument like race.

If your and your spouse's ancestors are from Africa or the Mediterranean basin (as people corrected me above), there is a greater chance that your offspring will have certain diseases. If you meet the above criteria and your child has certain disease symptoms, you might want to spend resources to diagnose certain diseases that you wouldn't check for if your ancestors were, say, Chinese. Are you saying that we should throw out this information instead, out of principle? Should we start screening Chinese people for sickle cell?

It sounds as if you're no longer talking about race but ancestral nationality.

"Race" is basically an archaic, outdated and inaccurate cultural construct and taxonomic concept. It resulted from perceived differences due to biological traits, cultural differences and self-identification. For a long time there were attempts to keep it in the scientific domain, but it's clear now that it's really just an archaic classification system that people relied on before modern science (racial classification does not accurately reflect human genetic variation, often quite the opposite) and widespread contact with disparate population groups.

Wrong. The most rural and white states in the country voted more for Obama than Kerry. Look at Montana, the Dakotas, Vermont, etc.

The people of Appalachia voted for McCain for the same reason blacks voted so heavily for Obama. He is one of their own in a way that Kerry was not. McCain is beligerent two fisted Scots Irish. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/11/mccain-scots-irish-champi...

He was also using 1996 as his reference year. Clinton was also one of Appalachia/Ozarkia's own in a way that neither Obama nor Kerry were.

Yes, why did he choose 1996? 2004 is the more obvious choice.

Because it fit his hypothesis better?

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