Georgia Republicans are celebrating a lot of things from the 2014 midterms, and one of the things they're celebrating is an apparent uptick in support from minority voters.
I can understand the enthusiasm. A partisan divide along stark racial lines is not healthy for this state or for this country. Both parties need to find ways to bust out of that race-based paradigm and enlarge their appeal. Georgia Democrats need support from more than 23 percent of white voters if they hope to win statewide, and given rapid demographic change, Republicans have no choice but to expand beyond their traditional white electorate that is shrinking in relative size.
So why are Republicans so excited about 2014?
According to exit polls in 2008, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss got only 4 percent of the black vote in Georgia, an abysmal performance. In 2014, exit polls tell us, David Perdue almost doubled Chambliss' share of the black vote with 7 percent, and Gov. Nathan Deal more than doubled it with 10 percent of the black vote. Based on those numbers, it looks as though 2014 was a real breakthrough. It looks "huge," as the GOP's director of minority outreach described it.
Unfortunately, that's a gross misreading of the data.
In 2008, Saxby Chambliss wasn't alone on the ballot. A man by the name of Barack Obama was running for president that year, and the chance to elect the nation's first black president significantly altered the composition, attitude and scope of the black electorate. To accurately gauge minority voting trends, you cannot use a once-in-history presidential race when Obama was drawing a lot of excited black Americans to the ballot box as your base, and then compare it to a midterm election when Obama isn't running. It's simply not an apple-to apple-comparison.
If you want a valid base against which to compare 2014 results, you have to go back to 2006, the last midterm election in which exit polls were conducted in Georgia. That year, Gov. Sonny Perdue got 17 percent of the black vote in his bid for re-election. By that apples-to-apples, midterm-to-midterm comparison, Deal's performance of 10 percent in 2014 was demonstrably worse, not better.
The most recent presidential exit polls without Barack Obama on the Georgia ballot came in 2004. That year, President George W. Bush got 12 percent of the black vote in Georgia. That too is slightly higher than the numbers produced by Deal (10 percent) and David Perdue (7 percent) a decade later. If there's a trend -- and I'm not sure there is -- it's going in the wrong direction.
Georgia Republicans have also drawn a lot of encouragement from exit-poll data showing that Deal got 47 percent of the Hispanic vote. Some are taking that as proof that Deal's harsh attitude toward illegal immigrants and the party's refusal to consider a means of providing them legal status aren't really harming the GOP among Hispanics, and that no change of policy or approach is needed.
I think that's an even more serious misread than the claims about black support.
To begin with, Hispanic voters accounted for only 4 percent of those captured by exit polling in Georgia. That's a very small sample, which means it is prone to very large error.** The Associated Press, one of the prime sponsors of the exit poll, cautions that small-size sampling error grows larger still when the population group in question is a racial minority.
And when the minority in question is Latino, it gets even more problematic. For a variety of reasons explained in detail here and here, exit polls almost always overestimate Hispanic support for Republican candidates. The classic example was Sen. Harry Reid's 2010 re-election campaign in Nevada, which has a significant Hispanic population.
Exit polls in Nevada showed Reid winning that race, but by much less than his eventual 5.7-percentage-point margin. Those same exit polls also showed Reid winning just 68 percent of the Hispanic vote, while his opponent won 30 percent. Subsequent research showed that the exit polls has considerably overestimated Republican support from Hispanics. Instead of the reported 30 percent, Reid's opponent had actually won just 10 percent of the Hispanic vote, which was also why Reid's overall margin of victory was off in the exit poll.
In an interview before the election, Deal spokesman Brian Robinson promised a more aggressive Republican outreach to minorities. "Nathan Deal – even though this is his last election, he’s never running again – he’s going to plant the flag for Republicans and get out in our minority communities of this state, engage with them, listen to them, find commonality with them, so that we can have more minority support in the future," he told Bill Nigut of Georgia Public Broadcasting. "This is an existential problem with Republicans. We’ve got to appeal to minorities.”
Again, I think that's an important positive step not just for Republicans but for Georgia. I hope and expect that Deal will carry through on that promise. But if Republicans look at the results of 2014 and read them as saying that they can appeal to minority voters without changing either their message or their policies, even well-intended efforts will have very little impact.
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** In 2014 national exit polls, Hispanics voted in favor of Democratic candidates by a margin of 63-35 percent, a six-point increase in the Democratic margin since the previous midterm in 2010. Black voters went Democratic by a margin of 89-10, a one-point increase for Republicans. White voters went Republican by 60-38, a one-point improvement for Democrats.
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