Posted on 09/08/2009 3:58:14 PM PDT by rvoitier
"Obama is fast losing white voters' support".
A reasonable person might expect the punchline to be either that the manifest decline in Obama's approval ratings is particularly steep among white voters, or that race-related issues are responsible for Obama's current slump. A reasonable person would then click on the chart accompanying the article and discover...
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
Frankly if some pollster called me and said we are polling white voters I would hang up.
Talk about racebaiting. Idiots.
The author, in his attempt to snark at the LA Times, makes a couple of fundamental mistakes that make him look foolish.
The first is that he fails to note the preponderance of whites in the survey, or that blacks in the survey only dropped 3% while whites dropped 11%.
But more importantly, he missed the difference between percentage point drop, and percentage drop.
For example, the survey showed the white Non-Histpanic support for Obama has dropped almost 19%, from 53% to 42% (an 11 point decline, but (53-42)/53=18.6 PERCENT decline.)
The total non-white support dropped from 83% to 73%. While that is a 10-point drop, which looks similar to 11 points, on a percentage basis it is (83-73)/83, or 12%.
Compared, the drop among white voters is 50% greater than the drop among non-white voters.
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