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Old 11-17-2016, 10:07 AM   #25
glatt
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Arlington, VA
Posts: 27,717
I dunno about that.

He's comparing the percentage of voters in this election to the percentage of voters in 2012, but I feel like that's comparing apples to oranges.

I read in numerous places that Trump won because many Obama voters stayed home when confronted with Hillary on the ticket. Those Obama voters are not being counted in his analysis, but they are out there and will show up again if a future candidate motivates them.

I can't find the statistics, but let's crunch numbers based on figures that are available.

We know there were 124,326.830 total voters this year and according to NYT, 12 percent of them were black. That works out to 14,919,220. And of those, 8 percent voted for Trump. That works out to 1,193,538 black Trump voters in 2016.

In 2012, there were 126,849,299 total voters and 13 percent of them were black. That's 16,490,409 black voters. Of those, 6% voted for Romney, or 989,425 black voters for Romney.

Huh. More actual blacks voted Republican this year, not just percentages of voters.

OK.

Let's go back to Obama's first election.
In 2008, there were 129,446,839 total voters. Of those, 13% were black, or 16,828,089 black voters. Of those, 4% voted for McCain, or 673,123 black votes for McCain.

673,123 to 989,425 to 1,193,538.

The number of black Republicans steadily increases each election. So let's look at the trend for Democrats to see if population growth is skewing things.

In 2008, there were 15,986,684 blacks voting for Obama
In 2012, there were 15,336,080 blacks voting for Obama
In 2016, there were 13,128,914 blacks voting for Clinton

And now I'm not even sure what this post means. I'm contradicting myself. I think my calculations are somewhat flawed where percentages of voters are used to calculate number of voters. The percentages are given by NYT as nice whole numbers, but they have to have been rounded off, and the margins are so small, I think the rounding could be leading to misleading numbers. One thing is clear though, black Democrats who came out for Obama's first election have been staying home more and more with each election, and at the same time, the number of black Republican voters has been steadily increasing.

WTF

Last edited by glatt; 11-17-2016 at 10:16 AM.
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