The AP's Political Pulse is reporting on a new poll conducted along with Stanford University on the effects of racial stereotypes on the upcoming presidential election.
WARNING: This is painful to read.
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
More below
The apparent effect of race on the vote is relatively small, but combined with the assumption that the election is going to be very close, the article reaches the conclusion that it may be enough to matter.
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.
In the poll, voters were asked to rate how well certain positive and negative words described "blacks." (Note: That is directly from the poll. I hate the use of an adjective to name a person. I am a white person, not a "white." So, I wonder how such choices affect the poll.) This is perhaps the most disturbing thing about the poll, the premise that individual words can descibe a whole group of people. I would have had to refuse to participate in such a poll, beacuse I refuse to evaluate people as a racial or ethnic group, rather than as individuals. What does it mean to ask how well "friendly" describes black people. Some are some aren't, just like white people. So, I dislike how this poll was conducted, but it still mahy provide some important information.
Voters were later asked how likely they were to vote for Obama, and the attitudes revealed by the rating of the descriptors were correlated with the self-reported presidential choices. The strength of this poll does seem to be that it did not directly ask people whether the race of candidates would influence their vote.
This is probably the finding that matters most
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views
The article acknowledges a lot of racial progress in America in recent decades, but finds enough residual bigotry to affect a close election. In the end
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.
Back during the primary, even though I was a Clinton supporter, I deplored and deonounced diaries and comments on this site, and analyses from other sources, which tried to convince people to vote for Clinton because Obama's race would make him a weaker candidate in the general election. Race has no business influencing a Democratic primary. We owe it to our country to put forward our most qualified candidate and trust that this will move our country forward, win or lose.
I wrote this diary because the report is out there, even though I despise its assumptions and part of its methodology. I am not sure we can do anything directly about it now, except work hard enough to make the margin of victory large enough that these attitudes do not matter.
As a professional educator for 25 years, I have worked hard to teach students how to think, and I believe I can point to examples of how critical thinking has eventually erased long-held prejudices. Overcoming racism is a long, hard job. It will make getting Barack Obama into the White House more difficult, but a successful Obama presidency may be an important step in erasing what is left of our nation's bigotry.
Update: Thanks to bink for pointing out that Ron Fournier is one of two writers on this article.