The Hillbilly Vote

The day after the Presidential election Matt Yglesias spotted this map that shows the counties across the country which swung towards John McCain this year. As you can see, there aren't that many of them. But what's interesting is where they are:

Matt quipped that, "You can see why John McCain’s principled stand against higher taxes on the wealthy would have a special resonance in this region. Liberals who thought race had something to do with those appeals should be ashamed of themselves."  Andrew Sullivan agreed with Matt: "Ah, yes, Appalachia and Arkansas. Obviously concerned about marginal tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year, I suppose."

Now, clearly, it would be absurd to pretend - and I do not so pretend - that race had nothing to do with this. But I think this map rather more interesting than that. For that matter, I think the nature of the Appalachian and "Highland" vote is more interesting than this map might initially suggest. 

What the map shows is that McCain did better than Bush in south-western West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas. (One ought to remember that the map is also distorting: some of these counties had only five or six thousand voters, so the number of people required to turn the map red is not always large.) Still, as I say, doubtless some of this is attributable to racial prejudice, but it seems a stretch and, indeed, a simplification to suppose that this is the only factor at play. That is, one ought to be wary of presuming that race is the only reason a county might buck the national trend and swing towards Obama. 

Ignorance is, I think, a more likely explanation. I think it's worth observing that Obama didn't really campaign in any of these areas.(Marc Ambinder had a useful chart revealing where each campaign was spending their money). As George Packer observes, Obama did as well as John Kerry had in culturally conservative, pretty rural south-eastern Ohio and in parts of rural Pennsylvania. These placesaren't exactly the same as Tennessee and Kentucky of course, but nor are they vastly different. What I'd suggest, however, is that just as Obama was able to overcome a considerable degree of scepticism in Appalachian PA and OH so he might have been able to in KY and TN had he needed to campaign fiercely in those states.

Packer cites a pair of articles written by the New York Times'  Michael Sokolove who returned to his home town of Levittown, PA to take the political temperature in a key swing state. In the second he observed that:

Early on Election Day morning in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, Pa., Joe Sinitski, 48, stood in a long line inside a school gymnasium, inching his way toward three blue-curtained voting machines. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt and aNational Rifle Association baseball cap. He said he would vote for Barack Obama, a choice that some months earlier he could not have imagined.

“I have to admit, his race made my decision harder,” he said. “I was brought up that way. And I don’t like his name. I’ll admit to that, too.”

...A lot of people in Levittown needed the five months between the primary election and Tuesday to get used to a new idea. After Mrs. Clinton’s defeat, followed by a financial crisis that shook Americans to the core, they came to terms. If Mr. Obama’s race had been a factor, they eventually had to weigh it against other concerns. “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean,” Mr. Sinitski, the heating and air-conditioning technician, told me. “I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there. I could see that he was highly intelligent, and that matters to me, but my instinct was still to go with the white guy.”

Now perhaps white voters in Appalachia would have remained immune to Obama's charms had he campaigned in Kentucky and Tennessee and so on, but I can't help but feel that at least some of them might have reconsidered their votes had they had been barraged, as voters in PA and OH were, by pro-Obama messages. (This isn't a criticism of the Obama campaign since, rightly, it needed to devote its energies to winnable states.) 

Arkansas is, as ever, a slightly different case. The swing to McCain there may also include a Hillary factor. Indeed, according to exit polls nearly 30% of Democrats who voted for Hillary in the Arkansas primary voted for McCain in the general election. Racism? Who knows? Sour grapes? Almost certainly.

Furthermore, it's worth considering the possibility that some conservative voters were more enamoured of John McCain than they were of George W Bush. By that I mean only that some voters may have found McCain's personal story more persuasive, or even inspiring, than they did Bush's. That is to say, some voters may have been especially impressed by McCain's military service (and that of his forefathers) and that those voters may have been located, to a dispropotionate extent, in the south.

Though the percentage of Americans who are veterans is, broadly speaking, fairly consistent across the states, the south is, according census data from 2000, the only part of America in which the number of veterans as a percentage of the overall population is increasing. More importantly, I would suggest, some research suggests that as many as 75% of folk living in rural areas are likely to know someone who has served in Iraq - a figure that, if accurate, is, I warrant, rather higher than would be the case in urban areas. Equally, the Center for Rural Stregies estimates that the death-rate amongst military personnel is almost twice as high for those from counties of fewer than 50,000 people than it is from the most populous counties across America.

That doesn't make small town and rural America any more "real" than big city America. All it suggests is that, given the nature of small towns, the impact of military casualties is more widely, and even keenly, felt in small towns than it is in big cities. The chances of either knowing or, for sure, knowing someone who knows the dead kid's family, are vastly greater. Two, or perhaps three, degrees of separation. In such circumstances I don't find it hard to imagine vters being swayed by McCain's military heroism even if, on the merits, some of those voters might find themselves more in line with Obama's policy positions. This is, of course, guesswork on my part and I may be entirely wrong. Nonetheless, the point is that communities that send a disproportionate number of their sons off to war ought not automatically to be considered racist if they buck the national trend and endorse the decorated war veteran. And that applies even if some of them are racist.

And that brings me to a second map. This one is taken from the most recent census and shows the concentration of folk who, when asked about their ethnicity, answered "American":

 

As you can see, there's a considerable overlap with the counties that defied the national swing and endorsed McCain more heavily than they had Bush. It's true that the "American-Americans" only represent about 7% of the total population, but clearly they're more numerous in WV, KY, TN and AL in particular (with significant pockets in SC, GA and elsewhere).  This is, as you'll recognise for sure, the heartland of the Scots and Scots-Irish immigration to the US. And all - or at least most - of that was a long time ago. Senator Jim Webb will tell you that these are the people who built America in its early days and that they've been overlooked ever since. That's bred, he would say, a distrust of government promises (indeed, rightly or not, a scepticism towards government full-stop) and in time, I would suggest, a grievance against those who would define themselves (or permit themselves to be defined) as hyphenated-Americans.

This is America, they may say, and we are Americans. No more, no less. We don't look back or east or south so why in hell's name should you? The attitude is, I think, that once you're a United States citizen you should drop you hyphen. That's to say, I think many of these voters would have been suspicious of JFK's catholicism or, had he ever run, Mario Cumo's Italianism. There can be, for sure, and perhaps always is a certain ugliness to this but I wonder if Barry O'Bama or Jose Obama might have had almost as tough a time in these districts as did Barack Hussein Obama. For sure - and perhaps all this undermines some of what I've written here - there's a degree of racial prejudice at work here, but I also wonder - and this, I admit is somewhat speculative - if there isn't also at least something of a backlash against the idea of identity and hyphenatated politics entirely. (Easier, of course, for white folk in rural areas to rail against all of that. I don't defend this attitude, I merely wonder about it's putative existence and how widespread it may be.)

Some of this is, I suspect, a feature of a certain white working-class sense of self-pity and victimhood. Perhaps that is an unjustified sense, but I suspect it exists and that rather than simply or only condemn it one might ask if everything is as simple as lines and squares and colours on a map might make on think. That's all.

And, yes, to reiterate, I do think there's a racial element at work. I just wonder if that's the only thing.

Comments

[Ruck]

This really reads a lot like an apologia for white working-class racism in Appalachia. I have relatives in this area, and I've got to say that you can parse out the different portions of people's opinions (10% of their decision was based on race, 20% on Jingoism, 30% on military appeal, etc) but the fact remains that the exact same region disproportionately voted for Clinton over Obama, which suggests to me that they weren't digging into the better angels of their natures and honoring McCain's military service- they were voting against Obama. Given that the only significant quality shared by McCain and Clinton and not Obama is their skin color (Seriously- the McCain and Clinton platforms were diametrically opposed, all three candidates are senators, and Hillary has very similar political experience to Obama), I think it's hard to draw another conclusion without some serious gymnastics.

As an American I love my country and the people in it. And part of respecting the place that I live and the people who are here is to admit that a lot of my countrymen were fucking racist in this election, so that we can talk about why this is and find ways to address it.

[MattF]

Two comments-- First, note that this is a map of what happened on the margin-- the question addressed in the map is "What set of people changed their minds?" Second, what do Tennessee, Arkansas, and southeastern Oklahoma have in common? They are mostly-white, mostly rural areas that border on mostly-black areas.

Hard to avoid the conclusion that this is the racism belt.

[sarang]

I agree. Another complicating factor, btw, is that these areas have been getting steadily more Republican over time anyway. I have a graph of the trend here -- http://glassbottomblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/that-racism-theory.html

The reason the racism belt wasn't a wider swathe of the South is that the white Dem vote in Alabama or Mississippi is basically nonexistent and has been for some time. (In MS it dropped from 14% to 11% this year.) On the other hand, there were white Dem votes to be lost in Appalachia, and they were duly lost.

[toby]

There's an odd hiatus in Northern Mississippi - perhaps these are predominantly black counties. I am surprised at Arkansas and Oklahoma. Also, these states and West Tennessee are not Appalachia. Though I suppose at this stage, Applachia is a state of mind.

There seems to be more to it than just racism. I have a feeling other factors played a part. But racism has to be a part of it.

The good news is that for one of the few times in recent history, the South did not play a decisive role in electing a President.

Since the mid Sixties, Republicans have won the South. Carter and Clinton, as Southerners, depended on winning back enough Southern states. It looked for a while as if the Democrats would never get a Northern politician elected again.

Up to 1860, most Presidential elections were decided by the slaveowning South and its Northern "doughface" allies. The Republicans dominated the period 1860-1932. In 1932, FDR resuscitated the Northern-Southern coalition in a new guise. From 1968 to 2008, the Republicans subverted that coalition and turned it to their own ends.

[nimh]

You are not the first person to take this map and, observing the belt from Ozarks to Appalachians in the map, sought for meaning in the region's Scotch-Irish and American-American traditions. But I think this may be a misguided path, because there may not be anything specifically Appalachian about the movement revealed in the map.

Why not? Doesn't the map show up the Appalachian distinction clearly? Yes... but the distinction may not be about anything culturally specific to the Appalachians and Ozarks, but just about differences in the demographic balance. As MattF pointed out, these are the "mostly-white ... areas that border on mostly-black areas." The regions highlighted on the map have very low black populations. The regions to the South of this Appalachian/Ozarks belt, however, in the Deep South, have high numbers of African-Americans, and they weighed in on the election result.

So basically, imagine that ALL whites in the South as well as the Appalachians switched toward McCain. Then in the Deep South, that shift would be canceled out or even overwhelmed by the extra black votes that the Obama candidacy mobilised for the Democrats - and so those areas don't show up on this map. But in the Appalachians there's no black vote to cancel out the white vote, and thus the shift among Southern whites does show up clearly on the map.

I haven't looked up the exit poll numbers by state to check this hypothesis, but just wanted to say, wait - before you reach for specificities about the Appalachians by ways of explanation, it could be something more simple.

[NJB]

in the NYT article above with Michael Sokolove going back to Levittown, etc. That interview and reporting has no bearing on Appalachia, for accuracy's sake. It's a Philly suburb - if you look at a topographical map, you'll see how the land makes southeastern PA what it is. And its not Appalachia the Shamokin or Greensburg would be. It'd be like interviewing a fellow from Paisley and then mentioning the "Highlander" vote, knowwhattamean?
But whether their blue or red, McCain or Obama - they're all likely to be big Penn State fans who adore Joe Paterno and hate Alabama football like I do.

[ndm]

Ezra Klein has a short post on this - along with a nifty graph. He writes:

Broadly speaking, the more African-American voters in a given state, the more monolithically Republican that state is likely to be. It's not white voters, in other words, who are racist, but white voters in states with lots of black voters. You can come up with any number of hypotheses to explain the finding, but what's important about the graph is that the race of the Democrat was not a particularly powerful variable.

[MattF]

@ndm

But... not Maryland. And, IMO, not North Carolina or Virginia, either. Without that clump of Deep Southern states in the lower right corner, there's hardly any correlation. One can hypothesize "it's about race" or "it's about the South", but that graph doesn't prove one or t'other.

[nimh]

I looked up the state-level exit poll numbers by race now, and it turns out my suspicions were right. I wrote a blog post about it:

The red and blue states of white America in 2008: Southern whites constitute the real McCain Belt

I responded to a couple of your points, Alex, I hope you and the other commenters here might find it interesting. For example:

---------

"What the [exit polls] show is that whites in much of the Deep South actually swung toward McCain more strongly than the populations of the Appalachians and Ozarks highlighted on the NYT’s Electoral Shifts map. They just don’t show up on the NYT map because their swing is canceled out by the mobilisation of their black neighbours by Obama. [..]

In Alabama, 80% of whites already voted for Bush in 2004; but 88% of them voted for McCain now. In Mississippi, the Republican’s share of the white vote went from 85% to 88%. In Louisiana, Bush got 75% of the white vote, but McCain strongly upped that number still to 84%. [..]

What that means in turn is that extensive analyses of what exactly in the Appalachians’ demographic and historical specificities may explain its bucking the trend and moving to McCain were premature. Looking at the NYT Electoral Shifts map, for example, Alex Massie delved into “the nature of the Appalachian and “Highland” vote”. The Scotch-Irish heritage, the ethnic self-identification as simply “American”, the military tradition. But again, the mostly homogenously white Appalachians did not swing to McCain any more than their white counterparts further South; they actually swung to McCain less.

This in turn brings the question of race as motive back to the fore. If it wasn’t something specific to the Appalachian culture that moved the white voters that switched to McCain, was it just because they couldn’t bear voting for a black man after all? Massie’s analysis was based on the sense that "one ought to be wary of presuming that race is the only reason a county might buck the national trend"; hence exploring other facets of Appalachian culture and demography that may be at work. But if the Appalachian vote turns out to merely be a paler echo of the shift to McCain seen among whites in the Deep South, many of those facets seem rendered irrelevant.

---------

Critical feedback always welcome.

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