Ignorance in voting

There will always be a sizable minority of people who will judge a person by their skin color. Nothing is likely to ever change that. Living in the South, the idea of voting for a person based on skin color is simply not an issue to me. Personally I voted for four people this election who happen to be black and three of them were Democrats. What mattered to me was what their qualifications and experience was. Followed closely by what they wanted to do as an office holder and how they planned to use that office to accomplish those goals.

Frankly, I seriously doubt any person I voted for got elected. I am so disinterested in this election's outcome, that I haven't even bothered to look at any of the returns or even if any of the amendments passed. That said, one thing I did notice during this cycle was the wholesale ignorance exampled in the "man on the street" interviews on the national cable networks as well as the broadcast network affiliates in Atlanta. I concur on the examples of voters for Obama- except that it was not just black people who were seemingly clueless as to who they intended to vote for. The generalized gross indifference towards voters educating themselves was pretty apparent. Whether the interviewee was white or black, about the only thing they could spout as to why they intended to vote for Obama was because he was going to "change" things.

What a nebulous basis to vote upon.

As to the lockstep vote by blacks for Obama, partly it is ingrained political separatism that involves people growing up in families where being a Democrat is simple rote outcome. Partly it is because the public officials who are predominately focused to serving communities in urban areas tend to be black and tend to be ingrained in terms of social, economic, and political power. It is too simple to say blacks vote for blacks. Instead blacks vote for those leaders who probably are already leaders in their local communities. Political powerbases thus become established and black officials get progressively pushed up the ladder of elective offices to the ultimate level of the Presidency.

And that is no different from what happens in any other voting community- with one exception. Almost all other political polities are no so demographically exceptional. By that I mean, in almost any other demographic if you take a basic data point, say sex, ethnic background, education, employment status, sexual orientation, or even the trivial such as freckles or hair color, and then took a sample of that one data point and mapped out independents, republicans, democrats you see a fractured data set.

All the people you sampled may have freckles, but it is incredibly unlikely that 90%of them self describe themselves as democrats or leaning to democrat candidates. In the data point represented by blacks, you will see somewhere around 90% of all the sample being democrats.

Line up almost any other group of people with the same skin color and you won't duplicate that.

This is again not racist or even based upon racism. To a very real degree however, it represents one aspect of political unity as a social institution within the black community. Unlike many communities that are based upon skin color or ethnic origins, the black community has a political solidarity that is national in impact. Irish Catholics in Savannah Georgia will vote very differently from their counterparts in Boston and New York City. But the black community in Athens, Georgia will vote in lockstep with the black community in Atlanta, Georgia, and also as the same community did in Chicago, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, -- or just about any other community that happens to be black across the entire country.

I noted this as much before the election. The black community voting at 95% in favor of Obama to me almost makes it certain that blacks did not vote for Obama because he happened to be black. I assumed that this race would be a swing of 2-3%. As a voting block if the 10% of black who are not self identified as democrats had all voted for Obama out of simple skin color preference, then the percentage of blacks who voted for Obama would have been at around 98% and translated into the spread of the margin of victory. Instead its 95%, meaning you cannot attribute McCain's loss to black racism. His support would have been much higher among blacks if it was due to racism.

However I do think Obama won because the entire voter population is now systemically over run with voters who received zero civics education and simply take the process of voting about as seriously as they do when picking their NCAA basketball tournament office pool ladder.

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