When Progressives Do Demography

By Ian Tuttle

Monday, November 10, 2014

They say there are three types of people: those who are good at math, and those who aren’t. Andrea Grimes is in the latter camp.

Grimes, who holds the dubious distinction of being senior political reporter at RH [Reproductive Health] Reality Check, is not convinced, for example, that Greg Abbott actually “won women” in last Tuesday’s Texas gubernatorial elections, despite his having earned a majority of women’s votes. “You’ll hear that Greg Abbott ‘carried’ women voters in Texas,” writes Grimes in a piece elegantly titled, “White Women: Let’s Get Our Sh*t Together”:

    Anyone who says that is also saying this: that Black women and Latinas are not “women,” and that carrying white women is enough to make the blanket statement that Abbott carried all women. That women generally failed to vote for Wendy Davis. As if women of color are some separate entity, some mysterious other, some bizarre demographic of not-women.

Your humble author is no mathematician, but this is one problem I can manage: There are 100 women voting. Fifty-two of them voted for Greg Abbott. Fifty-two out of 100 is a majority. Therefore, Greg Abbott won women. That’s how math works.

Now, of course Andrea Grimes knows this. Defending her colleague, RH Reality Check’s Imani Gandy writes that “the point [Grimes] was making was far deeper and far more important than reductive claims based on simple arithmetic that ‘Women voted for Greg Abbott.’” The demographic breakdown is certainly important. “America” voted for Barack Obama, but it would not be much of a political strategy to say that a presidential candidate has to win “Americans.”

But what is troubling about Grimes’s piece is that she is not offering any meaningful demographic analysis, as her colleague claims; rather, she is simply pointing to the numbers to bolster the notion that Greg Abbott won by exploiting longstanding racial prejudices among white voters. “Time and time again,” writes Grimes, “people of color have stood up for reproductive rights, for affordable health care, for immigrant communities while white folks vote a straight ‘I got mine’ party ticket.” The fact that Greg Abbott won white women, but not minority women, is further evidence of “the historical crisis of empathy in the white community.”

Grimes conveniently leaves everything important to this argument hidden. For example, what does Grimes mean by “empathy”? Even if we were to grant for argument’s sake that whites vote based on a selfish “I got mine” mentality, how does it necessarily follow that minority voters are selfless? Furthermore, why should voting “for reproductive rights, for affordable health care, for immigrant communities” be evidence of selflessness (or “empathy”)?

And to make use of Grimes’s own method of analysis, isn’t it oversimplifying to say there is a crisis of empathy within the “white community”? Couldn’t one imagine a difference in empathy between whites with college degrees and those without? Between churchgoing and non-churchgoing whites? Between whites who read Mitch Albom books and those who don’t? Isn’t saying that there is a crisis of empathy within the “white community” making all those whites with empathy some mysterious other, some bizarre demographic of not-whites?

It is obvious from the above what Grimes’s argument really is: rationalization of the fundamental (and groundless) belief that Democrats are morally good (that is, selfless) and Republicans are morally bad (that is, selfish), and that since white voters tend to vote Republican, they must be selfish, while minorities must be selfless since they vote for Democrats. Grimes’s “deep,” “important,” non-“reductive” point about Tuesday’s election results ultimately reduces to nothing more than a storybook vision of America’s political character: heroes on one side, villains on the other.

To be fair, it would be unreasonable to expect deft political analysis from a site that hosts the “Angry Black Lady Chronicles” blog and is currently advertising a “Tacos. Beers. Abortions.” campaign, in which “you just eat a taco and/or drink a beer and donate to an abortion fund” (clever, right?). But in the wake of last Tuesday’s election in Texas, in which the Democratic candidate was thoroughly trounced however one interprets the numbers, Grimes is a marquee example of political commentary at its worst: shallow, cartoonish political antipathies masked by verbigeration and a few statistics.

Ultimately, it’s not Grimes’s math skills that need work.