15% Would Vote Against Obama Because Of Race?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, McCain, Race, Republicans
That’s the whisper from Politico…
I was talking the other day to a prominent Republican who asked me what I thought John McCain’s strongest issues would be in the general election. Lower taxes and the argument he will be better able to protect America from its enemies, I said. [...]The Republican shook his head. “You’re missing the most important one,” he said. “Race. McCain runs against Barack Obama and the race vote is worth maybe 15 percent to McCain.”
The man I was talking to is not a racist; he was just stating what he believes to be a fact: There is a percentage of the American electorate who will simply not vote for a black person no matter what his qualities or qualifications.
How big is that percentage? An AP-Yahoo poll conducted April 2-14 found that “about 8 percent of whites would be uncomfortable voting for a black for president.” I don’t know if 8 percent sounds high or low to you, but I was amazed that 8 percent of respondents were willing to admit this to a pollster. And I figure that the true figure is much higher.
The same poll, by the way, found that 15 percent of voters think Obama is a Muslim. He is, in fact, a Christian. But thinking a person is a Muslim probably does not encourage you to vote for him in America today.
Personally, I think the % is lower, but I guess we’ll see. If McCain pulls off some sort of stunning, landslide victory, we’ll know there’s probably some validity to this.
Now, how many wouldn’t vote for a woman?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Democrats, McCain, Race, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 22nd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Well, you have to balance out the equation, don’t you? If you’re going to subtract the folks who won’t vote for a black man, then you have to add in all the extra folks who will vote for him just because he is. Right? Obama is winning among blacks by somewhere between 8 to 2 and 9 to 1, and will quiye likely capture more like 19 out of 20 in large urban districts.
Consider big swing state Michigan with a population of about 10 million, 15% black, including Detroit with a population of about 1 million, about 80% black.
If you pencil in Obama to get 95% of the 800k black votes in Detroit, and about 85% of the remaining 700k non-Detroit black votes, that’s over 1.35 million votes right there.
That 1.35 million votes is MORE than the number of votes you get if you multiply the remaining 8.5 million non-black votes by the alleged 15% bias rate, which yields 1.275 million “racists.” It gives Obama a 60k vote lead in fact. Which means he’d need only about 49.7% of the vote among the remaining 7.2ish million “unbiased” non-black voters.
Now this quick math doesn’t model real life very well because I’m not using likely voters or turnout predictions.But it sure does suggest that the pro- and anti-black votes are at least in the neighborhood of cancelling each other out in states with decent sized black populations.
Hopefully, neither side will “count on racism” to determine the outcome of the 20078 election. But many folks WILL in retrospect view an Obama-McCain match-up as a litmus test that proves something. I’d bet the house on it.
The interesting thing is this. If Obama beats McCain, conservatives will be the ones saying how it shows America is not racist, while liberals will say racism is still a huge problem and they just had the better guy. And if McCain wins, it will be liberals who will be saying how it proves gross american racism, while conservatives will say that it just shows they had the better guy. In other words, we can count on the losers to act like sore losers. And we can count on the winners to give credit to their philosophy and candidate. To gloat, IOW. Neither side, if it loses, will question its philosophy.
April 22nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I feel the percentage of Americans who would not vote for Obama because of his race is higher than 15%. I have no scientific evidence to back that claim, just the feel I get hearing people talk.