Seeing things in black and white

Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias take Byron York to task for saying this:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

"How does the fact that much of Obama’s support come from African-Americans mean that he’s not “actually” popular?", Yglesias asks. "For York, "actually" means "what white people think."", DeLong declares.

Now, in York's defense, I don't think this is what he's actually saying. York is trying, in an inept and foolish way, to say that Obama's overall popularity may not reflect his popularity among swing voters. The implicit assumption here is that whites are more likely to be swing voters than blacks, so popularity-among-whites is important above and beyond overall popularity because it's a better barometer of electoral strength.

Which is still dumb to say. Because blacks are not, by any means, the only big chunk of non-swing voters out there. White evangelicals outnumber blacks, and they vote Republican almost as monolithically as blacks vote Democratic. If we're calling Obama's swing-vote popularity his "actual" popularity, we should exclude white evangelicals as well as blacks.

Or better yet, why not just look at Obama's popularity among independents? Answer: because the poll York is talking about didn't break things down by political affiliation. In fact the ONLY distinction or categorization the poll makes is between "whites" and "blacks" (what, Asians and Hispanics don't exist?). No "Republicans" vs. "Democrats". No "liberals" vs. "conservatives". Right from the first page, every single result - even the sample size - is listed in big bold letters as being "whites" vs. "blacks."

So Byron York was dumb because he naively accepted the interpretation to which the poll itself had biased him - namely, that the only important distinction between Americans is between "whites" and "blacks." York is just being stupid; it's the New York Times that's being not-so-subtly racist.