There's been a lot printed over the last week about African-American's being "responsible" for the passage of Proposition 8 in California.I'm always leery about a simplistic take on what logically appears to be a complicated issue and this is one such case.
I've read quite a few articles and blog posts on this issue and needless to say, passions are running very high about the passage of Prop 8 and rightfully so. Personally, I favored the defeat of Prop 8 for a variety of reasons but the main one is because I don't think it's anyone right to tell another who they should love and marry.
Is that really too much to ask for? But this isn't about my views it's about recent accusations, some of which have been very ugly, that African Americans are to blame for Prop 8 passing.
I'm not a statistician so I won't pretend this analysis is mine. Instead I'm relying upon what I view as an objective analysis from a trusted source, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com. Fivethirtyeight.com, if you recall, did an outstanding job analysing the poll data throughout the primaries and the general election and virtually nailed the final election and senatorial results...
Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters -- the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) -- voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin...
...At the end of the day, Prop 8's passage was more a generational matter than a racial one. If nobody over the age of 65 had voted, Prop 8 would have failed by a point or two.
For the full analysis, click here.
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