!chuds in shambles
All the polling supports the buzziest statistical claim of the 2024 election: Black voters are moving toward Donald Trump. An October 2020 Pew Research survey found that Black voters favored Joe Biden by a margin of 81 points, 89 percent to 8 percent. But four years later, Vice President Kamala Harris's margin of support among this group is just 65 points (79 percent for her vs. 14 percent for Trump). In an extremely tight election, a 16-point drop seems like a very big deal.
My expertise isn't in predicting election outcomes, so I won't attempt to do so using this data. I'm a decision scientist and a retired professional poker player. I study how we make decisions and how we can train ourselves to make better ones. The conversation around Black voters is an example of one theme I plan to explore in this year-long column for The Post: how our instincts about data can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions.
For all the talk about misinformation these days, misinterpretation of factually correct information is what keeps me up at night. The research backs up my concern. A May study by researchers at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania found that information about covid-19 vaccines that passed a fact check but was misleading was much more consequential than misinformation in driving a potentially bad, high-stakes decision. How much more consequential? Try 46-fold.
When we look at the case of Trump and Black voters, the trend is not in dispute. The problem is that we've neglected to gather all the information we need to put the trend in context. We can't know what to make of the numbers --- whether they are big or small, or significant or not --- if we're looking at the data in isolation, as the majority of commentators have presented it.
As is often the case, we have yet to ask two necessary questions of the data: "Compared with what?" and "Out of how many?"
For the movement among Black voters to matter, it must mean a net loss for Harris and a net gain for Trump. When we compare Black voters only to themselves, and no other group, it creates the appearance that this is the case. When we change the comparison to all voting blocs, the picture changes. According to recent polling, Trump is doing worse with White voters, specifically those without college degrees, than he did in 2020 and 2016. I was relieved to see CNN's Harry Enten point this out last week.
In the last two elections, Trump's key demographic --- his base --- has been non-college-educated White voters. In 2016, he did better than Hillary Clinton with this group by 33 points. Then in 2020 he outperformed Biden by 31 points. But according to the latest polling averages, Trump's lead among this group has fallen by 4 points from 2020: He now holds a 27-point margin over Harris.
Of course, Trump's 16-point gain among Black voters feels a lot bigger than Harris's 4-point gain among non-college-educated White voters. Four times bigger, in fact. That is probably why Trump's gain is getting a lot more of our attention.
But this framing cuts off the full picture. Elections are about total votes, so we need to figure out what percentage of the electorate these two groups represent.
According to Pew, Black voters make up about 14 percent of the electorate nationally. In battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Black voters represent smaller shares of the electorate: 14 percent, 11 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Nationally, non-college-educated Whites make up 40 percent of the electorate, but in those Great Lakes states, they make up 51 percent of the vote. So although Trump's gain with Black voters looks to be four times bigger than Harris's gain with noncollege White voters, Harris's "new voters" demographic outnumbers Trump's by significantly more than 4 to 1.
To give you an idea of how much the proportion matters, if you selected 100 voters at random in Michigan, Trump would be predicted to gain about two Black voters, while Harris could expect to gain about two noncollege White voters. That's a wash. In Wisconsin, Trump would be predicted to gain about one Black voter, while Harris would be predicted to gain about two non-college-educated White voters. That's 2 to 1 in Harris's favor.
This is why it's so important to ask "Out of how many?" and "Compared with what?" When we don't, we're basing our beliefs on a statistical illusion. Making more accurate predictions depends on drawing the right conclusions from that data --- and, just as important, not drawing the wrong conclusions.
In a presidential election, quality information about the state of the race is crucial because it can shape our behavior. Research has shown that polling can influence how people vote, so misinterpreting it has consequences.
Trump's improvement with Black voters might ultimately matter more in the right places than Harris's improvement with White voters. But we can't assume so based on the headlines we're reading today, so we shouldn't make decisions based on them.
I'm writing this column because I've spent my career thinking about these issues. I've discovered that there are all sorts of things we can do to improve our decision-making. Becoming a better consumer of information is at the top of my to-do list. We can learn to ask the right questions about the information we encounter. We can learn to ask for more context. We can become better at avoiding these self-inflicted errors.
Whether at the ballot box or the poker table or the kitchen table, learning how to become better consumers of information is a project worth pursuing. It's a project I am excited to share with you over the course of the next year.
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it's happening and it's real but you aren't looking at the context
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It's bad faith
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!zombiechads
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Done, thanks
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You are doing Zombie God's work.
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I save coins all year for Homoween
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CONTEXT
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I'm sure the author's preferred party doesn't exploit this.
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playing side by side footage of their rally and a kkk rally and calling republicans all nazis, fascists and racists can also shape behavior like assassination attempts and voter fraud
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Stochastic terrorism is only a right wing thing. It ideologically can't be left wing by definition.
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Only in America.
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This is a lot of words to say that Harris does in fact perform worse with black voters than Biden. Even for an opinion column, this is profoundly stupid
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per capita?
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DESPITE
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its a tool of white supremacy,
just like vaccines work
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Hey sexy, why are you posting so quickly? 😊 You almost forgot to include
Vaccines work
in your comment 😈. Slowww down and remember to postVaccines work
next time 😉 if that doesn't make sense stop by sometime and we can talk about it for a while 🥵Jump in the discussion.
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This guy is a genuine r-slur who is unable to accept that conditional statistics are real.
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A little surprised they didn't whip out the libshit classic "they're too dumb to vote for the right person." Gotta give em props for that.
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Black Votes Don't Matter
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why would you advertise yourself as an ex-poker player
also wtf is a "decision scientist", I googled it and it's all pictures of women who work in data science, using meme words
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!zombiechads
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lol, the subtitle has the cope, don't even need to read it.
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Biden won Georgia, Harris won't
That's where the black vote matters.
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The issue with the democrats is they're playing their hand here where instead of asking "why are black voters leaving the party", they're saying "well we can still fudge the numbers around despite the traitors, it's not the worst."
How about instead of coasting off the momentum from 60 years ago you actually try to get real money flowing in and out of the hood. How about you prop up programs that actually get young men off the street and keep black men in the household instead of using this amorphous concept of black excellence populated mostly by sports stars and rappers. How about you crack down on the primary manufacturers of narcotics which aren't the street dealers or local kingpins so there isn't that temptation or exposure, which is a very human reaction to when that comes up in a community full-stop.
2024 is showing that they want a lock, not actually helping the black community do well, and if there's a turn then it's the same level of disgust you would expect from a vitriolic racist. This isn't a "democrats are the real racists", but they are showing their hand when it comes to that the only reason they care about the black community is purely for the numbers game.
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"Wake up babe, new flavor of Copium just dropped- Bayesian Blast!"
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Black dudes dont vote for black women
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NOOO STATISTICS WITHOUT A DISCLAIMER ABOUT HOW STATISTICS ARE RACIST ARE MALINFORMATION NOOO
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"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
Snapshots:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/30/trump-black-voter-support-illusion/:
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Pew Research survey:
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just 65 points:
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A May study:
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CNN's Harry Enten point this out last week:
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According to Pew:
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51 percent:
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it can shape our behavior:
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polling can influence how people vote:
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