OPINION:
Politics cynically may seem to depend on promises and money, but really it rests on math. Nowhere does that math matter more than in determining where to obtain votes. By understanding the relevant factors, we can also understand why certain vote groups are so consistently and feverishly pursued politically.
Politics’ math may seem simple at first: The party with the most votes wins. However, deciding where to seek those votes is anything but simple math. Ultimately, it comes down to two crucial factors: bigness and balance — a group’s percentage of the electorate and the evenness of the partisan split of its vote.
Does it seem like there is a pro-woman bias in American politics? Their numbers tell the story. Not only are they a gender majority, they also split relatively closely between the parties.
Women, like any other sought-after electoral group, have the big and balanced numbers that politicians crave. The value of large voting blocs is obvious, but the impact of balance requires explaining.
In America’s two-party, winner-take-all system, elections are virtually zero-sum affairs: When one side loses, the other gains. A group’s partisan proportion, therefore, equals its political desirability, because it offers each party both great electoral reward and risk potential. Each party has had success in getting votes from the group, and each party knows it has a high probability to win or lose the group’s votes.
The same dynamic can be seen clearly in sports. The high-priced free agent is valuable because he has great impact in his sport. Every team wants him, and many have the money to pay him, so the price of his game is bid up.
Prior to free agency, this was not the case in sports, because players were effectively owned by their teams. This is still true in politics. Groups that vote overwhelmingly for one party tend to be neglected by one and taken for granted by the other: You don’t pursue the unobtainable, and you don’t buy what is freely given.
To test this big-and-balanced theory, look at exit polling from the last four presidential elections from Edison Media Research-Mitofsky International with an average of 17,781 respondents.
Examining seven prominent voter categories — race, gender, age, party affiliation, ideology, religion and population area — from these four elections, we can easily apply the two criteria.
On one hand, we can see various groups’ percentage in the electorate. The four largest electoral groupings are: whites, 76 percent; marrieds, 63.3 percent; Christians, 53.75 percent; and women, 53 percent.
On the other hand, we can determine political balance by simply dividing the groups’ minority-vote percentage by the majority-vote percentage. For example, a very unbalanced group might split 80 percent to 20 percent — yielding a .25 quotient, while a very balanced group might split 51 percent to 49 percent — yielding a .96 quotient. Whether the parties switch places between minority and majority between elections for the group is irrelevant — all that matters is the balance. The closer a group’s quotient is to 1, the closer its partisan balance, and the more sought-after it is.
The top four most partisan-balanced groups over the past four elections are: 45- to 64-year-olds, with a .956 measure; suburban voters, with a .946 mark; political independents, at .921; and surprisingly, Catholics, formerly a mainstay of the Democratic coalition, at .913.
By multiplying a group’s balance by its electoral percentage, we get its political impact. The top four political-impact groups have been: whites, 55.62; marrieds, 53.96; suburbans, 43.98; and women, 43.8.
These groups are a “who’s-who” of American electioneering’s targets. It’s not hard to understand why the middle class — which essentially is shorthand for so many of these groups — and women were the top targets in the past election and likely will continue to be.
There is a clearly quantifiable reason you see certain voting groups targeted in elections. The past election’s focus on the middle class served as an umbrella under which the biggest and most balanced groups from the past four elections fit very well. If you want to know what counts in politics, just remember: It’s not just about numbers, it’s about math.
J.T. Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and as a congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000.
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