Substitute

 A couple of months ago, I had a post which discussed research and reporting on the link between mental illness and mass shootings.  Andrew Gelman blogged about it the other day, and it has become my most viewed post (by a large margin) so I thought I should follow up on it.   However, after I started a post on it I couldn't think of anything interesting to say.  I'll come back to the issue, but meanwhile here's a post on a totally unrelated subject: 

Georgia just finished its runoff election for Senator.  It's one of only two states that have runoffs in general elections (the other is Louisiana)--everywhere else, the winner is the candidate who gets the most votes on election day.  The Washington Post had a story on the origins of the system--it involved a state legislator named Denmark Groover who lost his seat in a three-way race in 1958, made it back to the legislature, and dedicated himself to getting a runoff added.  He also was a hard-line segregationist who helped to devise measures to limit black voting power after court rulings and legislation made it more difficult to simply prevent black people from voting.  So the runoff was seen as a measure to protect white supremacy, and later in life Groover said that was how it was intended.  

The history was interesting, but what surprised me was that the controversy continues.  The story concludes by saying "voting rights groups in Georgia overwhelmingly support abolishing runoffs" and quoting the director of a voting rights group as saying "it is a relic of Jim Crow, it is suppressive, inefficient and is also fiscally irresponsible.  It needs to just go away."  The reporter also seems to have been persuaded--he quotes several other critics and no defenders.

Regardless of the origins of the runoff in Georgia, the idea that it should take a majority vote to win seems to fit with the popular idea of democracy, so there's a good case for the runoff in principle (Brazil and France both have runoffs in their presidential elections).  So I was interested in looking at public opinion on the issue.  I found only one question, from 1984:  "In some states, if no candidate wins more than half of the votes in a primary election, a runoff primary is held between the top two candidates. Do you think this is a good system, a bad system, or don't you have an opinion on this?"  Although that asks specifically about primary elections, it involves the same general issue, and applies more widely:  quite a few Southern states had (and I think still have) runoff elections in primaries. 

40% said that it was a good system, only 11% said it was bad, and 45% said they didn't have an opinion (the rest said they didn't know--I eliminated them from the rest of the analysis, although you could make a case for combining them with "don't have an opinion").  

The breakdown by race:

                      Good      Bad          No opinion
Black              43%        11%           46%
Non-black      43%         13%          44%

No discernible difference.

Region:

East                 40%           15%           45%
Midwest          38%           10%           52%
South               48%           14%           38%
West                 46%             8%           46%

Maybe some differences, but it's hard to be sure, except that Southerners were less likely to have no opinion.

Education reduced the share of "no opinion" but didn't have much impact on the ratio of favorable to unfavorable opinions.  There were no visible differences by party or ideology.  Women were a bit more likely to have no opinion, and to favor a runoff if they had an opinion.  The strongest demographic factor was age--young people were more likely to favor a runoff.  

18-29               49%               8%            42%
30-44               47%             13%            41%
45-64               43%             13%            44%
65+                  25%             16%            58%

I also considered region by race:  Southern whites were more favorable and less likely to have no opinion, but there were no clear regional differences among blacks (the survey oversampled blacks, so the numbers were reasonably large).

While doing this post, I discovered that Jesse Jackson had called for an end to the runoff system, and was even suggesting that he might make it a condition of supporting the Democratic nominee (the survey was taken in June, so the issue was in the news at the time).  That makes the absence of a racial difference particularly interesting.  My guess is that intuitions about fairness dominated everything else, among voters who had an opinion.  Whether a runoff actually worked* against the interests of black voters is a complex issue, so even voters in states with runoffs wouldn't easily be able to judge from experience.  And unlike the Electoral College, the runoff didn't have a long history, so attachment to tradition wasn't a factor.

*I say "worked" because the effects may have changed since 1984, given changes in the racial composition of the parties and increased willingness of white voters to support black candidates.  

 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]