On "significant" developments

A few days ago I posted (at Babalu) about a Herald article that left readers with the impression that some 4,000+ Republican voters in District 21 (represented by Lincoln Diaz-Balart) had gone independent.

Here's the relevant quote:

Generational change and the rise of independent voters will be tested in the 21st District, which stretches from Miramar and Pembroke Pines in Broward County to Miami Lakes, Hialeah, Doral and Kendall in Miami-Dade County. The district has 124,744 Republicans and 101,267 Democrats. The numbers reflect a decline of 4,558 Republicans and a gain of 111 Democrats since the 2006 election. More significant, perhaps, is an increase of unaffiliated voters to 71,208.

If you look closely there's a missing piece of information. What was the number of unaffiliated voters in the district in 2006? We can figure out the 2006 numbers for Republicans and Democrats but not for unaffiliated voters. Well I found the party affiliation statistics for the district in 2006 and it turns out that there were 70,927 unaffiliated voters in the 21st congressional district as of 2006. So the net gain in unaffiliated voters was 281. Is that the "significant" development that the Herald is referring to?

We're still no closer to knowing where the vast majority of the 4,558 Republican voters went but we know that they didn't join the Democrat party or go independent in any large numbers.

My guess is that it's a combination of voter roll purges and voters who moved out of the district and were replaced by non-registered residents.

And that "generational change", well the Herald has been reporting about that since at least the 1990s. Someday they are likely to be right about it. But I don't think 2008 is the year.

It's like deja vu all over again

I mentioned the other day that one of the reasons for starting Herald Watch was in response to a letter I wrote the Herald editors which they butchered and published. That letter was about the intentional blurring of statistics from the City of Miami which were used to make a point about all of greater Miami. The Herald's point was about how bad things are here in south Florida. Later Herald Watch exposed how Herald Columnist Ana Menendez was guilty of the same sort of statistical manipulation.

Well they are up their old tricks at 1 Herald Plaza. Robert from 26th Parallel has a very cogent analysis of the last bit of selective interpretation of demographic statistics in the local fish wrap.

The point here is that if you look at the Census numbers BEFORE reading the article, you would have noticed a bigger change: the number of 40-59 year old Hispanics moving TO Miami-Dade.

33, 27 and 29 percent increase in those between 40-44 years, 45-49 and 50 to 54 years of age, respectively. That a big jump folks. I'm surprised (well, OK, I'm not) that the Herald barely mentioned those numbers next to the 17 percent of 20-24 and 25-29 year olds that moved out. A brief sentence suggesting that "Hispanics and blacks who bought homes long ago or are nearing retirement age may be choosing to stay put for financial reasons" lacks depth. It's lame...

Let's face it, the Herald has been trying to promote the so-called Miami exodus-in-the-making since last year when they started writing stories about people getting the heck outta Miami. That's fine, they should. But they should also talk to the 40 and 50 year olds who are moving IN to provide the rest of the story. Isn't that what journalists should do?

Yes Robert, that is what they are supposed to do.

A city by any other name would be as poor

One of the reasons Herald Watch was created was in response to a letter which I submitted to the Herald. My letter was edited to remove a criticism of the paper itself and then published.

My beef then was how the Herald's editorial board used the words Miami and south Florida interchangeably while discussing poverty levels and the various remedies needed to improve them. I criticized the Herald because, while the City of Miami is undoubtedly one of the poorest cities in the country, it's not representative of south Florida or even dade county.

Well, Ana Menendez resorts to the same tactic in her latest column entitled While some indulge, let others eat cake. In the column, she juxtaposes the South Beach Wine and Food Festival with a meal being served at a homeless shelter. Her allegation is that the middle class in south Florida is being eliminated. The problem is that she uses statistics that only encompass the City of Miami.

In Miami, the numbers are more stark: In the same city where new condos sell for millions, one in three people older than 65 lives in poverty. Half of all families led by women are poor, as are 36 percent of the city's children. ''We're a city of extreme poverty and a city of extreme wealth,'' said Bruce Nissen, a labor professor at Florida International University.

Ms. Menendez engages in a statistical "bait and switch". In response to an email from Herald Watch, Ms. Menendez confirmed that the statistics she cited refer to the City of Miami not Miami-Dade county or the region overall.

Here's the thing, Ms. Menendez may be right. The middle class may be disappearing from south Florida leaving us with a very wealthy upper class and lower class that's in poverty but there's no way of telling that from the statistics she cites because the City of Miami only represents 16% of the county's population. And that 16% is admittedly stratified. But there are a lot of middle class communities in the other municipalities and unincorporated parts of the County that make up the balance of the 84% that don't live in Miami. Hialeah, the second largest city in the county is, by and large, a middle class city.

It's intuitive that as people escape poverty they tend to move out of poor areas. This obviously creates serious problems for cities like the City of Miami because the people that move out tend to be replaced by others that are poor that are looking for low-cost housing.

The point is this: If Miami were called something else, say Flagler City then Ana Menendez and the editorial board at the Herald would not be so quick to apply its economic indicators to the whole region or the county.

Setting that aside however Ms. Menendez also uses some faulty logic elsewhere in her column:

In the 1970s, the richest 20 percent accounted for 44 percent of the country's total income. By 2002, they accounted for 50 percent, according to census data. In the meantime, the poorest of the poor earned even less of their share.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke drew attention to the widening income disparity in a recent speech by noting that a full-time worker at the top of the wage scale now earns 4.7 times as much as a worker near the bottom -- up from 3.7 in 1979, The Associated Press reported.

While the statistics above prove that the rich are getting richer relative to the entire population it simply ignores the possibility that everyone's incomes, rich and poor, rose during the periods of time analyzed. In other words it does not necessarily follow that because the rich got richer that the poor got poorer. An analysis of whether this indeed the case is outside of the scope of this blog but Ms. Menendez' manipulation of statistics and facts to "prove" something that may or may not be true is not.