I Emailed Hillary

Gee engineer. You sure straightened me out. No difference in the candidates. I guess ill just fall in line with the rest of you ants and vote for Obama in spite of the fact I have serious reservations.

Your reservations are based on something other then objective reality, or a hard look at the positions of the candidates.

Cycloptichorn

Blacks roughly represent 20% of the US population. The population is politically split up three ways 1/3 Democrat, 1/3 Republican and 1/3 Independent i.e. not affiliated with either party. So of 100 people 33 to 40 would be Democrats, 25 to 30 Republicans and 25 to 30 Independents. Now Blacks mostly vote Democrats with a minimal representation within Republicans or Independents. Blacks/Democrats ratio (15 or 20) Blacks of (33 to 40) Democrats amounts to 40 to 50 % of the Democrats. Blacks are a major minority group within Democrats.

You're mixing up two things I said.

1) Black voters do not make up anything like 40% of the Dems as you claimed. It's more like 15-10%, as the exit poll numbers I listed showed.

2) Black voters even made up about just one-third of Obama voters. Two out of three Obama voters were white. (Well, I have to correct myself in light of what Cyclo pointed out: two-thirds were white or other non-black, like Hispanic or Asian; but mostly white.)

So, two different things. No, blacks dont make up 40% of the Democratic electorate. Nothing like it. And no, they dont even make up that much of Obama voters.

This is one of the most convoluted arguements I've ever seen anyone totry to pass off.



What does their representation within the genral population have to do with it? Not everyone is registered to vote and not everyone who is registered actually votes. Just for clarification, in the 2004 elelction cycle there were ~142 million registered voters in the U.S.. ~16 million of those were blacks. That's 11% of all registered voters.



Ummm.. No. If each represents 1/3 then 33% would be Democrats, 33% would be Republicans and 33% would be Independents. Nothing fancy there. Just basic math principles. 1/3rd has never equealed either 40% nor 25%. But your numbers are off anyway. It's closer to 40% Democrats, 40% Republicans and 20% Independents/Unaffiliated.



You ARE aware that Democrats can and do vote for Republicans and vice-versa right? Your assumption that because blacks tend to vote for Democrats = they are registered Democrats falls apart right here.



If there are 142 million registered voters and 1/3rd (33%) are Democrats then there are 47.33 million Democrats. There are only 16 million registered black voters so even if 100% of them are registered as Democrats that would nmean that blacks comprise no more than 33% of all Democrats. Your 40%-50% is out to lunch.

You're flat out wrong, and the exit poll data is right there to show it. Here, I listed the numbers on the previous page - though you're free to look them up for yourself (click the "Polls" link for every state).

That's the actual data, rather than some back-of-an-envelope calculation. Why not just check them before going off on some speculative calculation of your own?

Not to mention that your actual calculation is rickety in practically every sentence. For one, blacks do not "roughly represent 20% of the US population". According to the last census, they made up just 12%. So straight off the bat you're almost doubling the actual number.

I realise that you folks would love to reduce Obama having gotten more votes, more delegates and more states than Hillary to mostly just a 'black thing'. That darned power of those black Dems who force the party elite to abandon the better candidate! But aside from the offputting racial overtones of that argument, it's just plain factually false. Just one-third of Obama's voters in the primaries were black; two-thirds were white (or, rarely, Hispanic or Asian). That's a fact, it can be easily calculated on the basis of the actual exit poll data.