Saturday, October 14, 2006

Dick Morris is Crazy

Over at The Corner there's a discussion about a claim by Dick Morris that "two-thirds of liberals are black and Hispanic."

The 2004 National Election Study (NES) measures ideology along a 7 point scale running from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As the table below shows, blacks and Hispanics make up, at best, one quarter of liberals and nowhere near the two-thirds cited by Morris.

IdeologyBlack or Hispanic
Extremely Liberal25.9%
Liberal17.9%
Slightly Liberal24.5%
Moderate/Middle of the Road26.3%
Slightly Conservative17.2%
Conservative11.4%
Extremely Conservative16.7%

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

What is the right column? Is it the percentage of black/hispanic that are in the defined strata. In any case the numbers add up to way over 100%. Please explain.

Philip Klinkner said...

The number in the right column is the percent of each ideological category that are black or Hispanic. That's why the numbers add up to more than 100.

Robert said...

I'm not Dick Morris, so I can't be certain, but I think his logic is as follows...

About 27-33% of American Public says that they are liberal when polled. Those numbers follow the same proportion when asked if they strongly approve of the President.
Blacks and Hispanics represent 12.9 and 15.8% respectively. I don't know the breakout of Hispanics (I think it is 60-40 Dem), but blacks voted for Obama by at least 93%. If you take 93% of blacks and 60% of Hispanics, that represents about 20% of the population. Since 30% of population proclaims they are liberal, there is your 2/3 group of liberals = Blacks + Hispanics.