Many of you out there share my disappointment in California's approval of Proposition 8.  However, over the last week I've heard too many voices, even those rising from prominent gay communities like the Castro district, that have been far too quick to blame black voters for the proposition's passage.  The evidence being offered here, we are told, comes from exit polls.  How solid is this data?  As it turns out, not very.

Though reported here in an LA Times blog, as being from the AP, and here at CNN, this data all comes from one source: Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.  In case you're too lazy to click that link, allow me to make it plain:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International will again conduct all exit polling in 2008 for the National Election Pool, comprised of ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC and the Associated Press.

Though I couldn't find a similar statement from CNN, the AP confirms this in black and white.  You may remember how well this organization did with the exit polls in 2004, though I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether this was the result of poor polling methodology or poor election practices.

The general veracity of exit polls aside, how good was this one (since that's all we've got to go on here)?  I'll let Edward Champion from Reluctant Habits take this one:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International were the team behind the 2004 polling botch, and this dynamic duo also spearheaded this week’s California exit polling. The hard data is not yet available at the Edison/Mitofsky site. But the Associated Press has reported that 2,240 California voters (of these, 765 were absentees interviewed by landline telephone), interviewed in 30 precincts, represented the total number of people that Edison/Mitofsky interviewed. Which means that some percentage of these voters were African-American. Let’s give Edison/Mitofsky 50%. That leaves us with a mere 1,120 voters.

A quick jaunt to the California Secretary of State’s website reveals that there are 25,423 precincts in California and that 10.5 million people turned out on Tuesday. In other words, Edison/Mitofsky is making a major claim based on 0.11% (a little more than one-tenth of 1%) of the total precincts, and a sample of voters smaller than a crab louse dancing in a thorny thatch of hair. Is this really large enough?

Of course, this would be a pretty radical over-sampling of African-Americans.  According to the Public Policy Institute of California, African-Americans make up a mere 6% of likely voters.  So, even if black voters had turned out at 100% and voted for Prop. 8 at 100%, the maximum effect they could have had would be minimal.

One more thing: The last polls the week before the election that published race information showed the black vote split down the middle on Prop. 8.  SurveyUSA even shows a trend towards the "No" vote.

So, in summary: The now oft-repeated narrative about a once oppressed minority group rising to the highest office in the land only to become oppressors themselves is a whole lot of bullshit.  It's based on a single dodgy exit poll, which doesn't come close to agreeing with pre-election data, by an organization with a tenuous record for accuracy.  AND: Even if they got it right, we're talking about 6% of all likely voters among this particular ethnic group at best.

As such, I will say to Sullivan and others who were quick to jump on this narrative: Knock it off.  You're better than this.

Finally, there is one thing that we can draw from this data with a much higher degree of certainty.  You know who really voted for Prop. 8 in a big way?  The elderly and the religious.  Overwhelmingly.  Why people aren't talking about this, I do not know.  Maybe it's because it's all an old story: The seat of bigotry is occupied primarily by old people with old ideas.

I'll leave you with this clip of the always entertaining Dan Savage, who appeared on Tuesday Night's Colbert Report.