Nate Cohn Profile picture
17 Nov, 11 tweets, 2 min read
A few people have asked about some other demographic groups in Georgia, namely young and other nonwhite groups. For some arcane reasons, it's a little more complicated to think about those groups--but let's go into it
The age problem is induced on our end: we do not have the final Georgia SOS voter file from before the election (though we've had a request in).
This doesn't make a material difference on race, based on public state figures. It might on age, given that late registrants are young
If we did go down the road of analyzing age, based on this data, I'm fairly confident it would be at least a little biased against youth turnout, and potentially meaningfully for the way the story is written. So we're just going to wait and see on that one
Analysis of other nonwhite groups in Georgia has another kind of arcane, confounding factor: the growing number of voters with 'unknown' race
No matter how you cut it, the data shows a secular decline in the white share of the electorate in Georgia and an increase in the Hispanic and Asian share of registered voters
But the size of these trends--and therefore, the contribution of demographic shifts to Biden's win--is a bit dependent on how you handle the "unknown" race category
In our Times/Siena polling, voters with 'unknown' race category were actually slightly likelier to identify as 'white' in the survey than the rest of the state's electorate.
This is a pretty small sample, but the stakes are pretty high: there are many more 'Unknown" voters than Hispanic, Asian, Other combined in this state, and so how you think about this group is pretty important
To reiterate what I said earlier: there's no way around concluding that the white share of the electorate was lower than 2016--maybe around 2 pts--while Hispanic/Asian/Other were up about the same. But nailing this down is a real mess, given the size of these groups v. 'unknown'
Since maybe I didn't link it all together clearly:
if the 'unknowns' are relatively white and backed Trump (as they did in Times/Siena polling), then changes in the racial composition of the electorate all canceled out and made no discernible contribution to Biden's gains
Now, granted, the race was so close that it could have been decisive--even without a discernible contribution! But it does make it hard to write-up when that's in the range of possibilities

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More from @Nate_Cohn

19 Nov
One thing that's fairly unique about election analysis--and that rubs people the wrong way, I think--is the emphasis on the components of change from one election to the next
Take a football game. If a few weeks ago, Seattle loses to football game, 42-35, and then a few weeks later, Seattle beats the same team 35-28, with Wilson throwing 5 TDs, the headline is probably about Wilson throwing 5 TDs and the offense winning them the game
In electoral analysis, that's definitely not how we'd cover it. We'd say that the Seattle defense made huge strides and/or that the opponent's offense fared worse. Wilson would almost be taken as a given
Read 12 tweets
18 Nov
One election looms over the Georgia runoff: the 2008 runoff, when the GOP won a runoff election by 15 points after leading by just 3 points on Election Day.
I really don't think this should, well, loom over our analysis
For starters, some of the mythologizing about the 2008 runoff is wrong. Many analysts have blamed a precipitous decline in black turnout, but I don't think that's what happened
By my estimate (since for whatever reason the GA SOS didn't publish it, as they usually do), the Black share of the electorate in the GA special was 27.7 percent Black--it was down a bit from the general (29.9 IIRC), but still quite healthy (and indeed, higher than 2020!)
Read 18 tweets
18 Nov
This is a good question, so let's take a look
As an initial definitional question, we do have to define what we're calling the 'suburbs' here--and for simplicity I'm basically going to include the whole Democratic-trending part of the Atlanta area, including all of DeKalb and Fulton Counties--even though it includes Atlanta
There are plenty of suburbs in DeKalb and Fulton, and Biden made huge gains there. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to exclude Atlanta-proper from the historical data. But we can go back at the end and take out DeKalb and Fulton and see if it's a different story
Read 20 tweets
17 Nov
Let's take a look at the turnout data so far in North Carolina, where counties worth one-third of the electorate have now updated their vote history data
These counties lean a little bit left, with a disproportionate chunk of the white liberal vote (Wake, Buncombe, Durham all in). So I think these numbers could be rosier than the final tallies for Democrats statewide, but I think the patterns will largely hold up
Let's start with party registration.
In these counties, 77% of Democrats turned out v. 82% of GOP. That's a 7 pt increase over 2016 in both cases.
As a result, the electorate by party reg in these counties is D+5.8, v. D+7.4 among all registered voters.
Read 15 tweets
17 Nov
How Georgia turned blue: Huge gains in the Atlanta suburbs make up for a decline in the Black share of the electorate
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Georgia is the first state where we have fully updated vote history data, and it shows the Black share of the electorate falling to its lowest level since 2006
Biden compensated with huge gains in affluent and well-educated precincts
Read 4 tweets
14 Nov
A few random thoughts this morning on what Democrats should take from the election results, as the recriminations and so on begin
1) Democrats shouldn't blame themselves for *quite* so much!
This election was about Trump. He was the incumbent. It was a referendum on him, and everyone knew it. If the GOP did better, it's mainly because Trump was stronger than understood--not simply because Dems blew it
Or put differently: I'm not really sure there was much Democrats could do about what happened here. Trump completely dominated American life for the last four years, people knew what they thought of it, and it's hard to believe there were magic words to undo it
Read 12 tweets

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