I’ve seen a few articles claiming that Trump made gains with black voters in the 2020 election.
This vox article states,
One of the surprises in the election is that President Donald Trump actually improved his standing with Black voters over four years ago.
Well — no.
The percentages are misleading because voter turnout increased. It’s comparing slices from different pies.
He goes on to question the Democrat’s strategy with black voters. Some of this may have merit — but he doesn’t quite understand the maths.
I looked at data from several sources and have chosen a few typical ones to illustrate. Different estimates vary by a few percentage points, but all tell the same story.
First, we need to estimate the number of black voters:
Multiplying the number of black voters by exit poll percentages gives an estimate for the number of black votes for each party:
Sources: 1 2 3
This makes things clearer. Even though Trump’s percentages went up and the Democrat’s went down — the Democrats benefited more. A slightly smaller piece of a bigger pie is a lot more pie:
The net result was 2.5M more black votes for Biden.
This makes sense when you note that 100 non-voters have the same effect as 50 red voters and 50 blue voters. Practically speaking, not voting is half supporting Trump. Democrats gain from extra votes as long as their share is greater than 50%.
Focusing on Trump’s percentages misses the point. I’d happily convert another 10M non-voters with 30% going to Trump. His percentages would rise, but it would still net an extra 4M votes for the Democrats.
People who misunderstand this may conclude — something went wrong. A clearer picture shows — things went well. This election saw close to 5M more black voters than in 2016. This is good news for democracy. Black votes matter! Thank you to everyone who voted.
If you liked this post, I recommend this article:
The author moves away from a binary framing of anti-racism and focuses on effectiveness. She emphasises — you can be an under-functioning or over-functioning anti-racist.
References
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections
² https://edition.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls
³ https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2020/exit-polls/presidential-election-exit-polls/
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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