Like many of us here I was stunned by the racism stirred up by the passage of Prop 8 here in California.  In an effort to find if there was any truth to the accusations that our loss could be laid at the feet of the black community I wrote to Nate Silver at 538.com, explained what was happening and asked if he would be kind enough to crunch the numbers and tell us what really happened.  Nate provided his analysis today.

Here is the money quote, and I urge readers to go to Nate's website and read the entire report.

Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters — the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) — voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin. More experienced voters voted for the measure 56-44, however, providing for its passage.

Now, it's true that if new voters had voted against Prop 8 at the same rates that they voted for Obama, the measure probably would have failed. But that does not mean that the new voters were harmful on balance — they were helpful on balance. If California's electorate had been the same as it was in 2004, Prop 8 would have passed by a wider margin.

So now that we have but that to rest, let's see if we can't undo some of the damage we have inflicted on ourselves over the past week and move on.