Well, this takes the well-founded belief that the left only cares about blacks because of their votes to a new level.
At the Washington Post's "Monkey Cage" blog yesterday (seriously, that's it's name), Dean Robinson, an "associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst" who is apparently not a regular contributor, explores "the political consequences of excess mortality among blacks." The item's headline leaves no doubt that Robinson and the Post know in whose pocket the black vote resides. Robinson and apparently the underlying study's authors utterly fail to recognize that, as of 2010, the mortality problem they identify was barely half as important as it was in 1993, and that if current trends continue, the problem won't exist fewer than 20 years from now.
Here's that headline:
Blacks die sooner than whites. How many votes has this cost Democrats?
Well, at least we know why extending blacks' life expectancy is important. It's because the left needs their 90 percent-plus reliable votes (HT Rush Limbaugh; bolds are mine):
Black people in the United States continue to be sicker and die sooner than whites. These health inequalities have persisted even though they are contrary to what some policymakers anticipated in the post-civil rights era, when blacks gained greater access to health services, employment opportunities and other determinants of health. Because blacks lag behind whites in infant mortality, life expectancy and a wide variety of morbidity rates, they suffer from “excess mortality” — that is, black deaths that would not have occurred had the death rate among blacks been the same as that among whites.
Robinson's opening paragraph ignores significant reductions in the gap between black and white mortality in the past several decades (Source: United States Life Tables, 2010):
Obviously, this inconvenient reality negatively affects the credibility and future importance of the rest of Robinson's content. But here goes anyway:
But what are the political consequences of excess mortality among blacks? A new article by Javier Rodriguez, Arline Geronimus, John Bound and Danny Dorling — “Black lives matter: Differential mortality and the racial composition of the U.S. electorate, 1970-2004” — answers this question. It finds that excess mortality among blacks reduces their voting power significantly, perhaps costing Democratic candidates several elections.
Rodriguez and colleagues estimate that excess deaths among blacks totaled 2.7 million between 1970 and 2004, that 1.74 million would have been of voting age, and that 1 million would have voted in the 2004 election. Combining excess mortality with the consequences of felon disenfranchisement, they find that about 1 in 7 blacks (15 percent) did not have the opportunity to vote in 2004 for one of these two reasons.
... Nevertheless, the article demonstrates that black people are dying much sooner than whites, on average, and that this fact may affect the outcomes of elections. It is crucial to be clear about the first point to fully appreciate the second. Research has shown that blacks are not dying in excess because of differences in genetic endowment or health behavior. Instead, health disparities reflect racial and class inequality and an accumulation of stressors, including segregation, discrimination, exposure to pollution and unequal access to health-care resources, to name a few.
These social determinants of health depend to a great extent on politics.
Hmm ... based on the data, it looks like those "social determinants" aren't as important as they once were. How awkward.
On second thought, maybe Robinson and the study's authors recognize something we don't, namely that Obamacare (passed in 2010) has halted the progress in narrowing the white-black life expectancy difference noted above. What about that, Dean?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
