November 23, 2012

Religious breakdowns of 2012 vote by region

Hail to You uses Reuters' America Mosaic polling explorer to check out his theory that the reason Episcopalians voted for Obama more than other Protestants did is because they are concentrated in the Northeast. So he looks at whites' voting by religion for the Northeast and the South.

Mostly, it looks to me like whites in the Northeast went about 15-25 points less for Romney than did whites in the South and that holds for religious subsets. For example, Romney won 29% of the Jews in the Northeast and 46% of the Jews in the South. Romney got 45% of the Episcopalians in the Northeast and 66% of the Episcopalians in the South; 52% of the white Catholics in the Northeast and 72% of the white Catholics in the South. 

In general, the Reuters-Ipsos results are so beautiful in terms of how perfectly they would fit into a multiple regression model of how people vote that I sometimes fear that Reuters-Ipsos is pulling my leg. Maybe they didn't really survey 41,667 voters online. Maybe they just started with a multiple regression model with reasonable weights for race, gender, marriage, religion, region, state, homeownership, education, and so forth, and then just made up the data to fit the model?

I'm just being paranoid. I have zero evidence that this is a hoax. Indeed, a few times I've seen anomalous results from Reuters that represent small sample sizes that wouldn't appear in mocked-up data. For example, there is a reverse gender gap among white working class non-college voters in those Slippery Six upper Midwestern states that Romney lost fairly narrowly.

By the way, for polling wonks only, I figured out a way to get a reading on groups too small to get a readout on the Reuters polls. Reuters’ American Mosaic Polling Explorer is set up to not let you see the results for groups with a sample size of less than 100 respondents, such as Southern Mormons. But, you can figure out the numbers by combining groups below the cutoff with groups a little above the cutoff. For example, in Hail's 12 Southern states, there were 180 Jewish voters (excluding 3rd party voters), who went 45% for Romney. If I select Jewish _and_ Mormon, now I get a sample size of 266 that went 63% for Romney. This suggests 266 Mormons+Jews – 180 Jews = 86 Mormons in the South. Romney carried 63% of the Southern Jewish+Mormon group, so that would suggest he got 78 of the 86 Southern Mormons, or around 90%. (I’m doing the arithmetic in my head, so I might be off by a little.)

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

The change in font size after "I figured" is disconcerting. Feel free to delete this comment.

jody said...

mitt romney is now up to 60.2 million votes, so he got more votes than john mccain, and the second most votes a republican has ever received. the mormon didn't do all that bad considering he barely ran any kind of campaign in the general election and the media attacked him daily.

obama is up to 64.4 million. so he's actually pulling away as the votes continue to be counted. on election day the gap between romney and obama was about 3 million votes, now it's up to 4.2 million votes.

tell me again the republicans have a chance in 2016. what strategy should they employ to get the 66 million votes they will need to win in 2016? gotta win the popular vote by 2%? that's 64.4 * 1.02 = 65.6 big ones.

the only thing which might have a moderate effect is voter ID laws. which were, naturally, vigorously blocked by liberals in every blue state in which they were proposed. these laws might, finally, go into effect in the biggest blue states by 2014 or 2016.

too late to matter, but they will reduce voter fraud by a good amount. i expect the democrat candidate will lose 1 million votes just from nationwide implementation of voter ID laws. will it have a 2 million vote effect? i don't know if the effect will be that large. it won't be enough for the republicans to win, but it will have at least a 1 million vote effect. that is my prediction on the matter.

there were about 124 million votes cast in 2012, so a 1% fraud rate removes about 1.2 million votes, and most of those will be for the democrat. maybe the fraud rate is higher. 2%? that would account for 2.4 million votes.

jody said...

marco rubio has already been exposed as dumb as a box of rocks, ironically, with a single question about rocks. how old is the earth anyway, marco? care to consult a geology book?

let's not forget obama said some dumb stuff about this topic as well. but the media won't repeat his quote. good thing he's not a republican, or he'd have trouble shaking this one:

Q: Senator, if one of your daughters asked you—and maybe they already have—“Daddy, did god really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

A: What I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don't presume to know.

Anonymous said...

I’m doing the arithmetic in my head, so I might be off by a little

Not as if you'd have an electronic gizmo at hand for checking such things. Talk to you around 3, I have to hurry to catch my Acela, remember to buy milk.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. Even in the South, Episcopalians are the Protestant (yes, I am aware that the Protestant status of Episcopalians/Anglicans can be debated) group with the lowest level of support for Romney.

irishman said...

That Southern Jew figure is impressive considering it includes Florida. Debbie Wasserman shultz, the most repulsive woman in creation, has a heavily Jewish seat in Miami. It would be nice to see her become a victim of demographics.

Anonymous said...

...Debbie Wasserman shultz, the most repulsive woman in creation...

I dunno - I always felt like DWS was Hotter-n-Hades.

I bet that if you knew her in college - back circa 1985 - and if you coulda gotten a half a bottle of chardonnay down her gullet - then she woulda fornicated your little goyische balls right off.

Just sayin'.

Peterike said...

I would expect Romneys bump up in Jewish votes is almost entirely from small business owners and healthcare professionals, both prime targets for destruction by Obama and Obamacare.

These Jews matter little as a power group. My guess is Romney's share of the Jewish ruling elite is under 5%.

Anonymous said...

I would like to see the figures for white Unitarians, in particular in New England, and white Baha'i, in particular in California. Unitarians being ultra-liberal is old news. Baha'i seems to have attracted a lot of the well-to-do New Age liberal types and those who need something more intellectual than New Age (it can be seen as a religion deliberately designed to morph the West into something universal, or, uncharitably, as designed to subvert the West). Both seem subject to "jury amplification" (that is, "we are the most tolerant, so we're always to the left of whoever claims to be tolerant").

SFG said...

Hey Steve, just do the multiple regression for us already! Give us an R-squared and break out the coefficients for all the variables! It's a logistic regression, right? We can handle the math!

SFG said...

There are some Southern Jews who go back a long way--they supplied a few senators and the Confederate Secretary of State.

AlexS said...

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/24/nyregion/the-city-vote-precinct-by-precinct.html?ref=nyregion

Map of NYC precinct votes. Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn went for Romney.
"Mr. Obama’s worst precincts were in Orthodox Jewish areas like Ocean Parkway and Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Kew Gardens Hills in Queens. In a few precincts in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Mr. Romney won more than 90 percent of the vote... He also won in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn"

More here-
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/nyregion/in-manhattan-largely-blue-one-bright-spot-and-a-tie-for-romney.html?_r=0

Take a four-square-block slice of Gravesend, Brooklyn, a warren of high-priced residences dotted with Sephardic temples and yeshivas that happens to be the deepest single bloc of Republican support in all five boroughs. On Election Day, 97 percent of the voters there supported Mr. Romney, who beat Mr. Obama 133 votes to 3. …

On Monday in Gravesend, Jewish men in black hats, clutching prayer books, strolled past manicured lawns and driveways filled with Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes. A Maserati was parked across the street from a rabbinical school on Avenue S. It is a district of families and business owners, residents said, where religious values are often as deeply felt as economic ones.

“There is a perception that Obama is not the best friend of Israel,” said Ike Hanon, 22, a rabbinical student who lives on East Ninth Street, as he left afternoon prayers. “He’s been catering more to the Muslim countries.”
But his neighbors, Mr. Hanon added, many of whom are entrepreneurs and first- or second-generation immigrants, were equally turned off by what he called the president’s “philosophy of handouts and taking money from the rich.”

“We’re more of an upstart type of people,” Mr. Hanon said. “We’re go-getters. We want someone who really rewards hard work.”
Mr. Romney enjoyed strong support from a range of neighborhoods with large populations of Orthodox Jews, regardless of income level.

Mr. Romney won more than 90 percent of the votes in many precincts in the Borough Park and Sheepshead Bay neighborhoods in Brooklyn and in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. Some Romney supporters from those areas were surprised to learn their candidate had performed so well.

“I thought I was alone, a voice in the wilderness,” James Gibbons, a retired technical writer, said as he walked into a kosher supermarket on Avenue S in Brooklyn. He said the support for Mr. Romney was “terrific, but I wish it was spread out more.”
---

The article makes it seem like Romney supporters are all Orthodox. But the map makes clear that neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach voted for Romney. These neighborhoods have lots of Jews from the Former Soviet Union, most of who are not Orthodox.

It looks like, in Brooklyn at least, Romney was supported by Jews both rich and poor, Sephardic and Ashkenazi, Orthodox and not Orthodox.
I wonder what the Jewish vote in the Northeast would look like if Brooklyn was taken out of the equation.

Interestingly the Jewish neighborhoods on the map are redder than traditionally Italian neighborhoods (like Bay Ridge/Benshonhurst). I suspect part of the reason is that these neighborhoods aren't as Italian as they used to be- lots of new Chinese, Arab, Dominican, and Puerto Rican newcomers.

Anonymous said...

I was going to say truth is stranger than fiction, but the following probably makes sense, peas in a pod and all that:

"The Unitarian Bahai Association: A liberal, all-inclusive worldwide Bahai faith community"

I've never given a lot of credence to religion playing a major role in modern US culture and the rise of liberalism, but maybe I should change my mind. I also did not realize the long history of entanglement between Harvard and Unitarianism. Here's an 1885 Harvard newspaper editorial that perhaps doth protest too much:

"... no phrase was more potent to dissuade parents from sending their sons to the leading American college than that of "Harvard Unitarianism.""


So perhaps liberal Harvard might not be particularly new, all that jealous whining about WASPs not withstanding...

Eric Rasmusen said...

Very clever idea to get the less than 100 subset. 100 is actually a lot, if it's a truly random sample, and you could also figure out a confidence interval, tho I won't take the time to do it here.

Reg Cæsar said...

On Monday in Gravesend, Jewish men in black hats, clutching prayer books... where religious values are often as deeply felt as economic ones.

The English town of Gravesend in New Netherland was the second place in the world, after Rhode Island, to offer full freedom of conscience-- before Maryland and Pennsylvania did.

Take a four-square-block slice of Gravesend, Brooklyn, a warren of high-priced residences dotted with Sephardic temples and yeshivas that happens to be the deepest single bloc of Republican support in all five boroughs. On Election Day, 97 percent of the voters there supported Mr. Romney, who beat Mr. Obama 133 votes to 3.

How appropriate, then, for the genuine Mormon to crush the pseudo-Congregationalist and vise-grip to the Romans.

Reg Cæsar said...

The only county in America that is more than 1% Unitarian happens to be in the Ozarks. (The UU yoyos have a college there.)

New England is less Unitarian even than Mormon. The only religions founded in that part of the country that thrive today are football and basketball.

Anonymous said...

"The only county in America that is more than 1% Unitarian happens to be in the Ozarks."

I don't doubt this at all, but like some other small religious groups that sometimes come up around here you have to factor in how "elite" (or at least rich) this small percentage is and the effect they have on other's positions... I've known a few Unitarian elite types, but never knew anything about Unitarianism... didn't realize how different it seems to be from more standard Protestantism and how aligned it seems to be with upper-class liberalism.

Half Sigma has a post on this, Religion of the elites: Deism to unitarian universalism to Gaiaism. He also makes the point that membership is rather fluidly defined, so perhaps the ideas may have more influence than just the membership numbers suggest. But I don't know. I did not realize they form the core of what Pew research calls Unitarian and Other Liberal Faiths. Liberalism as religion, indeed.

I also did not know 11 Unitarians have won the Nobel prize. Other notables include Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, Charles Dickens, George Boole, Joseph Priestly, John Locke, Florence Nightengale, Herbert Simon... Tim Burners-Lee, credited with invention of the web... Them's not all Winter Bone Ozarks characters.

Anonymous said...

For what it's worth, Obama's grandparents on his mother's side were Unitarians:

"Madelyn and Stanley attended Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church..."

Obama's grandmother and mother were both buried Unitarian:

"On December 23, 2008, after a private memorial service at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, Obama and his sister scattered their grandmother's ashes in the ocean...

...same spot where they had scattered their mother's ashes in 1995."


Explains some things, maybe.

Jeff W. said...

You cannot get a real feeling for the sectional differences in the U.S. by looking at such huge geographic areas as "Northeast" and "South."

In his book "The Emerging Republican Majority," Kevin Phillips looked at county-by-county data to predict that the South would go Republican.

What we are really talking about here are the differences among white people. And the biggest difference among them is that some of the whites are in coalition with blacks, Jews, feminists, gays, etc., who are united in their effort to rule this country and crush any opposition. These are mainly whites on the East and West Coasts. Other whites are the targets of that coalition.

The targeted whites do not have political representation in Washington. The GOP has sold out to cheap labor, as everyone here knows.

Because the divide is between those who are in the ruling coalition and those who are out of it, it does not really make sense to focus on married vs. unmarried, affordable family formation, etc.

In coalition and out of coalition describes the real who? whom? of what is going on here.