Here are some of the basics that haven't received that much attention. Along with the unemployment, comes a higher poverty rate.
Much of the election results dissection frenzy carefully sidesteps the elephant. A clear majority of white Virginians supported George Allen post-Katrina and post-macaca. Without detailed data I'd estimate 55-58%. Yes, this was the outcome of a multivariate process, but these results indicate a cultural divide already demarcated so vividly in opinion polls on the government response to Katrina. In one Newsweek poll 65% of blacks thought the government responded slowly because the victims were black, while only 31% of whites agreed. Michael Dawson conducted a survey asking whether Katrina showed that racial inequality remains a major problem in the United States. 90% of blacks and 38% of whites thought so. [1]
I'm working on a piece on this cultural divide from my white perspective, but for right now the clearest single variable NOVA v. ROVA pattern I've seen is based on unemployment (2000 data).
Here are some of the basics that haven't received that much attention. Along with the unemployment, comes a higher poverty rate.
And relatively speaking, ROVA is aging.
Furthermore, NOVA is better educated.
This is a breakdown of Virginia data showing how deviations in either direction from the typical demographic makeup of a community tend to accompany economic underperformance. In other words, a decreased level of ethnic heterogeneity indicates some form of isolation whether cultural or geographic. This isolation in turn tends to be correlated with economic disadvantage.
In a map this data reflects the historic Cohee-Tuckahoe divide as well. Excuse the poor quality on this one.
For simplicity proxies for both are single measures: median income for economic well-being and proportion white population (PWP) rounded to single digits for diversity. Virginia is 72.3% white, and the assumption here is that less than 63% or greater than 83% indicates that the population of a locality does not reflect the typical ethnic makeup of Virginia as a whole.
In a rough fashion, this divides communities (cities and counties) into three groups: 49 have PWP in the middle band M with 63<=PWP<=82, 30 the lower band L with PWP<=62 and 55 in the higher band H with PWP>=83. As expected communities with large African American populations are in the L group, and particularly white rural communities cluster in the H group. Alexandria helps pull up the L group, and Fauqier, Hanover, Falls Church and Albemarle are in the H group. Economic disparity is expected across these three divisions, but its degree is surprising.
Here's the population breakdown with PWP and median income (MI) weighted by the contributing local populations.
The median income for communities with larger than average African-American populations is the lowest, followed by communities with unusually high white population. The communities with an ethnic mix closer to the norm tend to have much high median incomes. Certainly there is segregation at the finer levels (e.g., neighborhoods). As coarse as this breakdown is, it certainly tells the story more accurately than the idea of NOVA v. ROVA.
[1] Michael C. Dawson, "After the Deluge", Dubois Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 2006
This is the exit polling for Arizona's anti-gay marriage referendum, which lost. The age demographic is interesting -- the young and the 45-59 generation (ah, the Woodstock generation) were the most liberal.
It's striking in the AZ poll how education correlated with a liberal vote.
Great post, Kathy.
THERE ARE ONLY TEN KINDS OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD; THOSE THAT UNDERSTAND BINARY AND THOSE THAT DON'T.
Doesn't surprise me such a large percentage of (mostly male) white voters stuck with Allen. Many of these folks are my relatives and the line of imagined macho leadership is entangled with their religion and their pocketbooks, and has a long, long history. Again, Tidwater vs. Mountain Virginia, in other words the Anglos of the lowlands against the rawboned Scots-Irish of the mountains. There's a lot of history buried in your data, Kathy, but the important thing is: what are we going to do with it to prevent Allen and his cohorts from roaring back?
What do we do? The populist message is a positive one, but I feel that one of our tasks is to learn or relearn how to talk about our heritage, particularly the culture of Jim Crow and its lingering consequences.
Some how your survey of VA has to go public. I doubt if the older generation can be embarrassed, but the middle age and younger generation can. So I will leave it up to you other genuis on line to figure out how to make the rest of the nation aware, that if VA is like this, could the rest of the blue states that turned RED states after the Civil Rights act be the same?
Just as important as that program is the willingness on the part of its developers to reach out into the communities and try to understand living heritage rather than become immobilized. This kind of vision is happening in Virginia in many places, for example, the efforts to build a slavery museum in Fredericksburg.
We're very removed from most of these efforts out here in rural areas. They aren't as much part of the landscape.
((.62*.39)+(.53*.39))/(.39 + .39)
If you do the math, that works out to 57.5% of the white vote.