MSNBC postscript: 11% of conservatives and 10% of liberals with adopted or stepchildren live in mixed-race households

Among the 11 percent is tea-party favorite Tim Huelskamp, although as Ace notes, on Twitter that’s only further evidence of Huelskamp’s racism. If you’re into persecuting minorities, there’s no deeper deep cover than adopting kids who are minorities. It just proves how far you’re willing to go for the cause.

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This is interesting work by Jim Lindgren but it won’t change a single mind. Republican racism is a “political fact” whether or not it’s an actual one. Coming soon to MSNBC: “Whopping 89 percent of conservatives with step- or adopted kids have no family members from other races.”

Not surprisingly, there is no statistically significant left-right political differences in the proportion of adopted or step-families that are in mixed race households. Indeed, among families with step-children or adopted children, 11 percent of conservatives were living in mixed race households compared to 10 percent of liberals living in mixed-race households.

Similarly, 9.4 percent of Republicans living in step- or adopted families were in mixed-race households, compared to only 8.8 percent of Democrats in such families. (Again, this small advantage for Republicans is not large enough to be statistically significant).

If one breaks things down further by both party and political orientation, only 7.7 percent of liberal Democrats and 3.6 percent of moderate Democrats lived in mixed-race adopted or step-households, compared to an insignificantly different 10.6 percent of conservative Republicans.

I’m trying to guess how this inconvenient actual fact will be spun to reconcile it with the “political fact” mentioned above, assuming Lindgren’s findings aren’t entirely ignored. Figure on some combo of (a) just because 11 percent aren’t opposed to mixed-race families doesn’t mean the other 89 percent aren’t red with rage about it; (b) Democrats are more racially diverse as a party than Republicans and it’s simply not fair to impute bad motives to minority households that lack members of a different race the way it is to kinda sorta impute them to white households; and (c) to the extent card-carrying liberals are shying away from cross-racial adoption, it’s because they want minority children to grow up experiencing their own culture, even if it means experiencing it in an orphanage. The obvious conclusion, that we should probably avoid jumping to partisan conclusions in matters like this, is a nonstarter. I wonder which MSNBC primetime host will seize the bull by the horns in this exciting bit of re-narrativing.

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Relatedly, Ace flags this post from Matt Welch wondering why New Yorker writer David Remnick so easily assumes, without offering evidence, that older whites dislike Obama because they “feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country.” You’ll recognize that claim, of course, as the bitter-clinger theory of why working-class whites don’t vote liberal, made famous by Obama on the trail in 2008 and reemerging from time to time ever since among other big-name Democrats. Lefties are comfortable dismissing influential Republicans and conservatives as racist because they know they’ll never win their votes and because they know that their targets have the wherewithal to fight back. They take a different approach, necessarily, to the conservative rank-and-file. They can’t dismiss voters whom they hope to attract by calling them names and they can’t, as good class warriors and self-proclaimed egalitarians, fault the hoi polloi for not being as enlightened as a senator or a New Yorker editor. They need an alternate explanation for them voting the wrong way that somehow finds them faultless. Bitter-clinger is the answer, dismissing cultural and policy disagreements as a byproduct of economic hardship which, naturally, only Democratic policies can remedy.

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