Race – populyst

A French version of this article appears in L’Express.

Former mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced that he would spend as much as $100 million of his own money to help Vice-President Biden prevail in Florida on Election Day. This underscores once again the importance of Florida in this and every presidential contest.

Florida has a good track record of picking the winner in a presidential election. With the messy 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the state gained prominence as the ultimate prize and must-win battleground. To be sure, it is not a perfect track record, given that Florida favored George H. W. Bush in 1992 and Richard Nixon in 1960 over winners Bill Clinton and John Kennedy. If you go to earlier times, you also find that Floridians misfired with John Davis and James Cox in 1924 and 1920, two unknowns today except among aficionados of electoral history. But in sum, four misses out of 25 elections over a century can indeed be called a strong track record.

The stakes are high in 2020 given the state’s 29 Electoral College votes and the tightness of the race according to the polls. Vice President Biden is now nominally ahead by 1 to 3%, an insignificant gap that can easily close or widen in the remaining days of the campaign, depending on a slew of factors, not least the performance of each candidate in the upcoming debates.

Where were your ancestors from?

Over 45 million Americans identify their dominant ancestry as German and 22,000 identify theirs as Marshallese, from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. But in the US Census proposed new form for 2020, both of these groups get their own box to check for the first time. In the previous 2010 form (shown below), German-Americans would simply check ‘White’ and Marshallese-Americans would check ‘Other Pacific Islander’.

In the 2020 form therefore, the US Census is seeking more disclosure and more granularity in the population data. This desire for more detail is not evenly spread however. The Marshallese, 0.01% of the US population, get as much real estate on the form as do German-Americans, 14% of the population. Germany being a country of many regions and Bundesländer, there would surely be more fragmentation in that 14% if anyone cared enough to know the percentage who claim for example Bavarian vs. Hessian ancestry. Read more →

Category: Race

Florida in the Election

The US Census Digs Deeper