I’m still chewing through the exit polls, though Steve is right that there are no big surprises. I think I’ll put up a few charts which display questions where responses can be thought of in an ordinal manner just to make clear the trend lines. But of course Andrew Gelman has already crunched the data. His main findings are:
1. The election was pretty close.
2. As with previous Republican candidates, McCain did better among the rich than the poor. But the pattern has changed among the highest-income categories.
3. The gap between young and old has increased-a lot. But there was no massive turnout among young voters.
4. Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.
5. The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.
6. The pre-election polls did well, both for the national vote and for the states.
Please read Andrew’s post for all the charts which display the data from which these assertions derive. #2 in particular is interesting in light of related findings which suggest that support for the Republican does not increase monotonically with wealth. Some of you might object to #1, but my guess about the popular vote looks to be correct; Obama will win by 5 points. Remember that Bush won by 3 points in 2004. In contrast Reagan won by 10 points in 1980, while George H. W. Bush won by about 8 in 1988. Neither of these are assumed to be landslide elections on the order of 1964, 1972 or 1984, but they are substantially wider margins than 2008’s results. I am willing to point the finger at increased polarization and partisanship over the last generation to explain these findings; we might not see the volatility which characterized the period between 1960 to 1988 for a long time (I think it is plausible that if Ross Perot was not in the race during the two Clinton runs, he would have possibly topped 50%, but just barely as most of the social science I’ve seen suggests that Perot voters had a Republican tilt and to a large extent came back to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004). In 20 years we might be able to grade on a “historical curve,” and so assess this as a very large and substantial victory, but until then we’re still in the shadow of the 1970s and 1980s, when Republicans wracked up big majorities by picking up the pieces of the collapsing New Deal coalition.
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