Election showed nonwhite voters' growing power

by: Salaam

Sat Nov 08, 2008 at 22:21:32 PM EST

Sen. Barack Obama attracted tremendous support from African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, and the strong turnout among black and Latino voters in key battleground states helped push him to victory, exit polls show.

The prominent participation of nonwhite voters - and their preference for Obama - is a demonstration of the increasing electoral strength of a multicultural America, a potency that will grow in coming years, analysts say.

Political analysts are studying exit polls and voter turnout data from Tuesday's election and beginning to discern who voted where and for whom.

While Obama attracted more support from white voters than did Sen. John Kerry in 2004, he garnered just 43 percent of the white vote while drawing almost all black voters and 2 out of 3 Asian and Latino voters, according to CNN exit polls.

"The playing field of presidential politics has changed," said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research center in Washington focused on the African American electorate. "There was a great deal of discontent with the state of the country and the economy; that was a big part of it. But this was a historic occasion with Obama being the first black major-party nominee."

Obama inspired African Americans to vote in record numbers this year, and analysts believe that will continue as more closely contested elections in Southern states are likely to keep black voters engaged. And the growing political muscle of Latino and Asian voters signals that, after decades of robust immigration, immigrants and their children and grandchildren are becoming full participants in the American political process.

All three groups turned away from the Republican Party definitively this year.

"That's something that should be very concerning to the Republican Party: They are losing support from both Asians and Latinos, the fastest growing population groups in the country," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of political science at UC Riverside.

If Republicans can't regain their appeal to those groups, they might become a party of white voters in an increasingly minor role, said several analysts.

Story here.

Scientists' new theory: Religious diversity a response to disease

by: Salaam

Wed Sep 17, 2008 at 06:52:12 AM EDT

Proving the point involved collating a lot of previous research. Even defining what constitutes a religion is fraught with difficulty. But using accepted definitions of uniqueness, exclusivity, autonomy and superiority to other religions they calculated that the average number of religions per country is 31. The range, though, is enormous-from 3 to 643. Côte d'Ivoire, for example, has 76 while Norway has 13, and Brazil has 159 while Canada has 15. They then did the same thing for the number of parasitic diseases found in each country. The average here was 200, with a range from 178 to 248.

Obviously, some of the differences between countries are caused by differences in their areas and populations. But these can be accounted for statistically. When they have been, the correlation between the number of religions in a place and how disease-ridden it is looks impressive. There is less than one chance in 10,000 that it has come about accidentally.

The two researchers also looked at anthropological data on how much people in "traditional" (ie, non-urban) societies move around in different parts of the world. They found that in more religiously diverse (and more disease-ridden) places people move shorter distances than in healthier, religiously monotonous societies. The implication is that religious diversity causes people to keep themselves to themselves, and thus makes it harder for them to catch germs from infidels.

Story here.