Friday, December 12, 2008

More on Kennedy's Support

One of the most interesting things about our poll from earlier this week finding that Caroline Kennedy was the top choice of New York Democrats to replace Hillary Clinton was her support from black voters who grew up during the time her father was President and her uncle was serving the state as a Senator.

Among black voters who were born between 1943 and 1962, 65% listed Kennedy as their top choice and 29% listed her as their second choice for a total of almost 100% saying she would be one of their picks. No candidate earned anywhere near that level of support with any other demographic subgroup of the population.

John and Robert Kennedy were certainly very popular with black voters, and more than 40 years later it appears the affection African Americans in New York feel for the Kennedys remains.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The problem with that:

Survey sample =957
African-Americans=16% of sample
People 46-65: 43%

=> African-Americans born in that time period = ~66 people.

MOE: 12%, which is rather high to make any such judgments.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and already, 60% of African-Americans have Kennedy as their first choice, 29% as their second.

I think this is probably just random error within subsamples.

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's random error at all; I think it's meaningful data, to a point.

Two issues here: the first, as Tom referred to down the page a ways, is that Kennedy and Cuomo ate the only two candidates with any name recognition whatsoever. You've got two universally known names (last names, at least) and a bunch of people barely known outside their geographically tiny power base. (Congressional districts in the NYC area are pretty small.)

The other issue is that Andrew Cuomo said some stupid things last January that got him tagged, fairly or otherwise, as a racist. I don't know if that's still top-of-mind for anyone, but it's probably at the very least a subconscious drag on his brand among black voters. (Before I posted this, I had a hunch there was something negative about him, and I had to google to find it; I suspect it's similar for a lot of people.)

 
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