I’m obviously not alone in this, but I’ve been concerned about an African-American’s ability to win a national election since Barack Obama announced his candidacy. Racism in this country – subtle and overt — has been too deep-seated and too institutionalized for too long for his skin color simply not to matter.
It’s a cliché, but I’ve always believed that whatever the polls show, Obama’s true level of support is likely five to ten points lower than whatever Gallup says it is.
A few weeks ago, I said on the New Capital Show that given the climate, it’s hard to find a race-neutral explanation for the closeness of the presidential election. Richard Murray, the University of Houston political science professor and KTRK analyist, wasn’t so sure.
Today, the Associated Press and Stanford University released a comprehensive poll based on an extremely large pool of over 2,200 respondents. The results are ugly:
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks – many calling them “lazy,” “violent,” responsible for their own troubles.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 – about two and one-half percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He’s an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation’s oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents . . .
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
One interviewee (who may or may not have participated in the survey – AP doesn’t say) put it bluntly:
“We still don’t like black people,” said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.
We (myself included) spend a lot of time bemoaning the very existence of bigoted 9th Century throwbacks like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and al Qaeda who hate women, Jews, Christians, gays, and Muslims who disagree with their ignorant worldview. But what about the John Clouses and his buddies of the world? If some coffee shop yokel is willing to go on the record with this kind of idiocy, what else is out there? How many of the people surveyed succeeded in concealing their racism, making the number of people who wouldn’t vote for a black man even higher than reported?
Just as the Middle East can’t progress so long as Islamists have a say, not much good can get done here if American racists get to decide who our leaders are.
UPDATE:
Nate Silver isn’t very impressed with this study. In particular, he warns that
It is irresponsible to cite this study without fully disclosing its methods or making it subject to peer review, particularly as it appears to use a rather convoluted soup of statistical and inferential techniques.
I hope there’s some methodological flaw in the study. We’ll see.
I addressed the Bradley Effect above. While I agree that the Stanford study doesn’t deal with that phenomenon directly, there is a relationship. Nevertheless, Silver cautions:
One should be very careful not to confuse a study like this with the Bradley Effect. Of course some people are racist, and will vote against Obama because he is black — I have met some of them. But the Bradley Effect concerns something different — whether such people are likely to lie about their behavior to pollsters. There is simply no empirical evidence that the Bradley Effect exists any longer. It did not exist in the primaries, and it did not exist in the 2006 Senate race in Tennessee, which was perhaps the most racially-tinged contest of the past decade (in fact, Harold Ford slightly outperformed the late polls).
I find this last bit particularly unconvincing. In a follow-up piece on TNR, John B. Judis points out that
the Bradley effect has not appeared unequivocally in elections in over a decade. But there is some controversy about whether it showed up in the Democratic primaries this year and will therefore appear in the general election.
(Emphasis mine.) So there is evidence of its continued existence, but perhaps not of the quality that would persuade Silver. I’m less optimistic.
Last year, the New York Times ran a piece on the Obama Effect:
Since 1958, the Gallup poll has been asking people whether or not they would be willing to vote for an African American for president, although the wording has changed some over the years. In 1958, 53 percent of the public said they would not vote for a “generally well-qualified person who happened to be a Negro.” That was considerably higher than the 28 percent who said they would not vote for a Jew or the 25 percent who said they would not vote for a Catholic.
In February of 2007, Gallup asked people if they would be “completely comfortable voting for a qualified presidential candidate who was black or would you have some reservations?” Ninety percent said they would be completely comfortable.
So ninety percent of Americans say they’d be completely comfortable voting for a black candidate, but, if this new Stanford study is to be believed, substantial numbers of those same Americans wouldn’t because the candidate is black. If both the Gallup and Stanford polls are to be believed, a huge Bradley Effect awaits Obama.
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