2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: The "PoC don't support Bernie because they don't know him" claim is actually true [View all]MellowDem
(5,018 posts)Tracking political ideology is very different from predicting election winners, it's easier to do, especially as it has been being done for many years in a row, and there's a reason why the Gallup tracking polls are consistently similar from year to year, which we would expect, with only slight shifts, again, in directions we expect. It's because it's consistent. That's not a matter of white privilege, but of how polling and statistics work.
And while the final Gallup polls showed Romeny 50 and Obama 49, the results were 47 and 51, not exactly a huge difference, and close to the margin of error for both candidates. Which is to say even if you think Gallup is getting it consistently wrong with their political ideology polling, it probably isn't by much.
Many people on DU can't understand why blacks would vote for Clinton since she seems moderate and DU assumes blacks must be quite liberal, but the polling shows they're pretty moderate, making her support not a big surprise at all. The visceral reaction is to the reality that the US as a whole is relatively conservative to DU, and a lot of people don't understand that or don't want to believe that, hence the continued disbelief and lots of excuses being thrown out.
Polls are the only relatively objective way we have of finding out how different demographics define themselves ideologically. And the polls show that Clinton's support among blacks isn't some big mystery when it comes to political ideology. These same polls make whites support on the Republican side of very conservative candidates not surprising either. The polls bear it out, the Republican Party overwhelmingly defines itself as conservative, Democrats have much more ideological variety, including lots of self-described conservatives.