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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I'd be curious to know how other aspects of the felon demographic intersect with its racial makeup. Although they are disproportionately black, it's also disproportionately male and not college-educated. I suspect it'd still solidly favor Democrats, but less lopsidedly than someone might imagine.

[I'll just repost a comment I wrote on this]

There have been multiple studies, but it's difficult to get a clear picture because every state is different and there are a host of confounding variables.

It's relatively straightforward to get a good perspective from Vermont and Maine, because those are the only states that allow people currently incarcerated to vote from prison. The Marshall Project surveyed that population and did not find that they leaned heavily Democratic.

Elsewhere however, a common problem is that it is very difficult for felons to know exactly their right to vote is restored, so many of them don't bother trying even if they are legally allowed to. If you asked me right now to answer without looking up whether felons can vote in my state, I literally have no idea whether they regain their right upon release or after a judge restores it, and I'm a public defender who has processed hundreds of guilty pleas! All I know is that felony convictions take away your right to vote, and you get it back "someday".

Besides the lack of knowledge, felons face higher hardships (finding housing, finding employment, not committing more crimes, etc) than the general population, and their appetite for voting is a fairly low priority. You can see why something as heavily publicized as a referendum on a constitutional amendment for voting right restoration would draw a lot of attention and get people with convictions coming out of the woodwork to register. In a state that is as purple as Florida and with razor-sharp electoral margins, this is bound to be a catastrophic risk that just isn't worth it for the party that expects the short-end of the stick.

Vermont and Maine are ~95% white. Their state prison populations are overwhelmingly white. It's not reasonable to infer that the same political preferences follow for the nationwide prison population.

If you read the article, the prison population was 'roughly half' nonwhite. It also claims the POCs were "20 percent identifying as black, 14 percent as Latino, 17 percent as Native American and 19 percent as Asian or other races" (which adds up to 70%?), and that they polled at 20% trump / 30% novote / 50% dem, while whites 40% trump / 25% novote / 35% dem.

Then at least one of three possibilities must hold true:

  1. The interviewed population was far broader than Vermont and Maine state prisoners.

  2. Serious cherry-picking of interviewees took place.

  3. Vermont and/or Maine have diversity quotas for their prisoner population; gangs of New England slavers roam the country to fill said quotas.

Seriously, I have a hard time picturing any state except maybe Alaska with that kind of minority breakdown in its prison population.

I agree, and would never claim otherwise. It might still be a useful sample if compared against that specific state's average. But besides that my main point is that we don't know much on this topic, and finding out more information is very hard.

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