I wrote that citing Obama’s “sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are” … Maybe “across-the-board” would have been better than “overall,” but I doubt that would have kept a left-wing activist like Matthew Yglesias, or Andrew Sullivan, who has himself been accused of racism and, quite recently, anti-Semitism, from branding me a racist.

York doesn’t seem to realize that “actually are” was just as problematic, but let’s ignore his drive-by accusations of two people who haven’t written themselves into a mini-controversy this week.

My question was why York was engaging in the occasional conservative habit of asking what a Democratic politician’s support would be like if there were no blacks in the equation, something that is usually done after an election to talk down the Democrat’s electoral mandate. You heard a lot of this after November 2008, with conservatives arguing that black voters’ racial solidarity pushed President Obama over the finish line, and that they were “the real racists,” unlike white voters who had been accused for months of possibly lying to pollsters about whether they’d support Obama. York’s answer:

What if a president were wildly popular with one group, and only middlingly popular with another group and yet was often portrayed as being hugely popular with the whole group?  It seems worthwhile to point that out that there are differences within the group — something that is done all the time with political polls.

It’s done all the time because politicians are always trying to expand their margins with various members of their base. It’s rarely done to argue that one group’s extreme support shouldn’t count, because that’s moronic.

It’s the old joke:  Six people are in a bar.  They’re all middle class; their average net worth is about $100,000.  Bill Gates walks in.  Seven people are in a bar; their average net worth is in the billions.  A wealthy group, right?  Internal numbers are revealing.

That’s actually the way that Fox Business Channel views the economy (GDP is up, therefore everyone is richer and has higher wages) but it’s a foolish way of viewing a political poll. Public opinion isn’t about what the average person thinks, but about whether a majority can be cobbled together out of a group of people to push the Congress to make a decision or to re-eleect a politician. If you have one group of actors you can count on, you try and build up your support with other groups. This is what, for example, Mississippi Republicans do as a result of their low support with the state’s large black population — they try to win black votes on the margins and maximize the white vote.

62 percent of whites approve of the job Obama is doing as president. Among blacks, the number is 96 percent.

Obama won 43 percent of the white vote and 95 percent of the black vote. His black support has increased by only one percent, but his white support has soared by 44 percent.

The other strange thing about York is that all of this appeared in one of Washington, D.C.’s three newspapers — a city that’s 55 percent black, with an electorate that’s 56 percent black. The Examiner isn’t generally read by black Washingtonians, though, which might be one reason why the paper’s op-ed brass thought it wise to publish a piece about why those people didn’t really count.

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[Obama's] sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are. Asked whether their opinion of the president is favorable or unfavorable, 49 percent of whites in the Times poll say they have a favorable opinion of Obama. Among blacks the number is 80 percent. Twenty-one percent of whites say their view of the president is unfavorable, while the number of blacks with unfavorable opinions of Obama is too small to measure.

Wow! That’s really something! What could possibly explain this if not racial solidarity? Except …

The Obama Effect even spills over to the subject of Vice President Joe Biden. Forty-four percent of white respondents say they approve of the way Biden is handling his job, while 81 percent of blacks approve.

Wait — why is the gap between white and black voters even higher for Biden than it is for Obama? Is this an Obama Effect or is it the preference of black voters for the Democratic Party? Let’s pick a random 2008 race between two white candidates: the North Carolina race between now-Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and then-Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.). Seventy-five percent of voters were white, and Dole won them by 18 points. But 19 percent of voters were black, and Hagan won them by 95 points. Obama only defeated Sen. John McCain by 90 points among black voters in North Carolina (while losing whites by 29 points).

So there are two explanations here. Explanation A: There is an Obama Effect that is dazzling black voters to such an extent that they are supporting white Democrats even more strongly than they support Obama. Explanation B: Black voters strongly support the Democratic Party, and have since the 1960s, for a number of complicated reasons. I think Explanation B is more likely, which is problematic for Republicans if they, like York, equate the “actual” support for Obama’s policies with “support from whites.”

Update: One quick note: I contrasted Biden’s approval numbers with Obama’s favorable numbers, and obviously those are calculations of two different things. However, the white-black gap on Obama’s job approval is 34 points, even bigger than the 31-point gap on the favorable numbers. York puts that number near the end of the column, possibly because the 62 percent job approval number that Obama enjoys from white voters make it even stranger that York is trying to argue that the guy’s not that popular.

And one more quick thing: Part of York’s argument is that black support is higher than white support for some of Obama’s specific polices, on the economy (higher by 36 points), on foreign policy (higher by 32 points), on “bringing real change in the way things are done in Washington” (higher by 36 points). That still doesn’t explain why the usual racial gap in party support matters here, unless the implication is that black voters are dazzled and supporting whatever Obama says. That’s not a criticism you often hear of, say, white evangelical voters vis-a-vis Republicans.

2nd Update: I have more on York’s column here.

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