ROUND FOUR FOR THE THIRD WAY. Now that the folks at Third Way have weighed in to defend their recent report claiming that whites, males, and the affluent (and I suppose, by extension, affluent white men) catapulted the Democrats to power in the 2006 midterms, let me respond, and also add a few things.
First of all, I must repeat that the "normalization" technique they use is misleadingly wrong. If they don't like the baseball metaphor I employed last time, here's my response to their claim that they produced an apples-with-apples comparison of the two electorates by simply multiplying one to scale with the other: Take an apple, which is normally smaller than an orange, and multiply it by 125 percent and see if it looks and tastes like an orange. The normal turnout in an off-year is simply not the same in a presidential year, for a variety of reasons, of which Mark Schmitt's smart point about differential turnout in competitive v. non-competitive districts is just one. (Others are the lower number of political ads and contacting, less media coverage of politics that cycle, and so on.) This is why their results are artifactual, and it is also why I produced a very simplified example of two, back-to-back elections in which Democrats both do no better among whites and better among blacks in a congressional cycle and yet still draw a greater share of votes from whites during that cycle -- again, because of differential turnouts. Third Way offers no response to this demonstrated mathematical fact because, well, there is no counter-argument.
