New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African-Americans.
What you see is it’s perfectly possible to hold a negative view of at least one aspect of African-Americans and yet simultaneously prefer Obama,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Racial feelings are not as cut and dried — not as black and white — as people often say.”
Franklin explored those contradictions in a large, national survey taken in mid-September, when the Illinois Democratic senator's rival, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), led in many polls and the nation’s economic woes had not yet produced a deep crisis. The poll asked voters whether they agreed with the statement that “African-Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing." About a fifth of white voters said they “strongly agreed.” Yet among those who agreed, 23 percent said they’d be supporting Obama.
This result is reasonable if you believe that race is not as monolithic an effect as we might easily assume,” Franklin said, noting that 22 percent of those who "strongly disagreed" said they'd be supporting McCain.
Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there’s a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man.
“If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, ‘How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,’ they would say, ‘That doesn’t sound good to me,’” said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. “But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it’s a different situation.”
“The house is on fire, and one guy seems like he’s calm and confident and in charge, and that’s the only option,” he said.
Not all whites associate the generic African-American with Obama,” said Ron Walters, a longtime student of race and politics and aide to the senior Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. “They give him credit for having half a Caucasian ancestry, and give him credit for his education, and give him credit for his obvious ability to take complex subjects and parse them.”
The geography of racial conflict and tolerance has been a strong overlay of the electoral map. Obama has run better than past Democrats in prosperous states with little history of tension, such as Colorado and Iowa, and worse in working-class states in the Appalachian belt. His campaign has been structured around this dynamic and may actually have overestimated the number of white Democrats in the region unwilling to vote for him because of his race. Obama had ignored West Virginia, for instance, until a spate of positive polls prompted him to start advertising there this week.
Obama has also ignored Southern states with a history of deep racial division, from Arkansas to Mississippi, in favor of those that have seen an influx of new voters from the north — Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
Until this fall, both campaigns viewed Michigan — a heavily Democratic state, but one with a history of tension between Detroit and its white suburbs — as Obama’s Achilles’ heel. In 2006, the state was deeply divided by a referendum to ban affirmative action. The measure was opposed by most African-American voters as an assault on hard-won gains, but it won broad support among whites and passed by a double-digit margin.
But earlier this month, McCain gave up the state for lost as economic concerns appear to have trumped racial ones.
“Obama’s personality — his speech, his look — he provides [white voters] with a non-threatening way to move forward on this issue, and that’s a very positive development,” said David Waymire, who led the unsuccessful opposition to the anti-affirmative action initiative. “He is not Kwame Kilpatrick,” he said, referring to the Detroit mayor who resigned last month after pleading guilty in a sex and misconduct scandal.
For black observers of American politics in particular, Obama’s ability to win over voters who harbor negative views of African-Americans at large is a complex, but hopeful, sign.
Racists for Obama?
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Originally Posted by Azael33
