The numbers are terrible but the study estimates that anti-black sentiment will only cost Obama about 2 points in the polls.
The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).
I do wonder how the polls would look if the Democratic candidate were white. I particularly wonder how the state polls would differ. How would the Democrat look in states like Georgia, Missouri, or West Virginia? We’ll never know, but we might get some idea in 2016.
I can say from direct experience that a Democrat would do very well in WV with the policies Obama is promoting. Two issues that might hinder a Democrat’s performance would be environmental regulation and cultural sabotage.
The propaganda about the War on Coal is very strong. Never mind that the state newspaper continually reports that there are more coal jobs now, than in 2008. The current problems with coal production is that-
a) Older environmental regs are now being enforced while they were ignored under Bush II
b) The boom in natural gas production has forced the price for gas below coal for the first time in 50 yrs?
The coal companies can’t lay their loss of contracts at the feet of their own incompetence or lack of negotiating skills. Must be someone else’s fault.
There will also always be an undercurrent of disbelief about Democratic Presidential candidates in rural America. This is due to fundamentalist ministers who are fed their information from a very real below radar network of sources tied to the dirty tricks wing of GOP. Clinton was a murder, Hillary a Lesbian, etc… those are the surface of a smear foundation. With Obama they have real meat to work with. I have argued time and again that Obama is not a Muslim, the AntiChrist, etc… Which is fed daily to low information voters in the mountains.
However, the tendency to support anyone tied to helping alleviate poverty would overcome the smears. Coal industry opposition would also be over-ridden due to a century’s worth of opposition.
No, unfortunately, racism is the real underlying fact about Obama not carrying WV and other parts of rural America. That is fading as newer generations come in, but still present.
R
Westerners are selling coal contracts to China. Is that not an option for Appalachian coal?
Russians are active in southern WV fields, with Indians also buying. Here is a 2009 article. More recently they are buying processing plants in McDowell Co.-
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KC05Ag01.html
Deep mining has picked up. That is metrological coal which is used in steel production and other industrial enterprises. Burns hotter and has a higher BTU content. Need a growing worldwide economy for that to start really booming.
The surface mining was often for steam coal (power generating) and that market has decreased. Re-enforcement of Clean Water Act has made it expensive to mine those seams. That and the dropped price of gas has made it profitable for power stations to switch to gas. There are some environmental cost benefits to the plants, but not wholesale as has been described. Many of the coal fired plants were slated to be closed anyway.
There was a lot of study about this in 2008, both before and after the election. The problem was that measuring blatant and latent racism in polls is one thing (and that study in the AP piece was consistent with the results of some work Pew did early in the 2000s), measuring how it impacts decision-making is another.
One issue is that most overt racists are already Republicans so not many votes change there. Another issue is that latent racism is only one factor in an overall decision so it’s hard to see exactly how many decisions are changed by that one factor.
And then there is the potential for a counter force. Be careful reading here as I’m not stating my views – I’m stating opinions I’ve heard others voice: quite a few non-black people actually preferred voting for a qualified, polished black candidate for President (and by that yes I do mean that he doesn’t “sound” or “act” black, whatever that means). The idea being that it gave them a sense of doing a good deed and also a sense of promoting the idea that blacks can do better on their own if they just act like Obama.
Anyway, with all that noise going on it was hard to figure out exactly what the impact would be. The best studies in 2008 looked at the pre-election polls, the exit polls, and the actual votes-by-precinct and compared the results to what the demographics would have expected otherwise. Again, you have trouble filtering out unrelated trends in voting, but what they found was that in normally “purple” or “blue” electoral areas the trend away from Obama was heavily concentrated in Appalachia and extending into the Ozarks. This is in line with the other comment here about West Virginia.
So 2% of the vote switching to Romney because Obama is black is probably about right, but most of that is happening in non-competitive states – unfortunately it also is making it harder in three important swing states (FL, NC, GA) and may also be why PA is closer than it should be, although still safe for Obama.
In addition, a couple of states might be competitive without this (WV, AK, maybe even TN and GA).
I still get amazed to reflect that rednecks under 55 are voting to kill off their guaranteed retirement health insurance because they think the President is a secret Muslim from Kenya who gives all their taxes to his bro’s in the ‘hood. ‘Course, they are mostly too stupid to realize that, but I’m pretty sure even if they did realize it they wouldn’t change their vote.
There is one definite oddity there–79% explicit racism among Republicans, but only 64% implicit racism? Can that be accurate? More Republicans express racial prejudice than actually feel it?
Exactly. They feel it is expected of them.
He may lose a couple of points due to racism but I would argue that his blackness has encouraged voters that may not have otherwise voted to go to the polls and vote for him. Not saying it’s a Sununu thing, but instead a Progressive thing.
Any time this country does the right thing — regardless if that is by popular demand, legislative action, or judicial action — a backlash emerges and reverses some or all of the better angels moment. If an actor can be made to symbolize that moment of Americans doing the right thing, so much the better, particularly when the actor can be hollowed out into a shell of the original person.
For the next hundred years or so, the white elite will deny racism in this country because Barack Obama was once POTUS. Some day they’ll have to install a woman as POTUS to refute charges of sexism. (That would have happened by now if there had been a not-bat-shit crazy GOP woman to elevate, but “they” are working on it.) In the meantime, two steps back and one step forward will be mistaken for progress.
So, somewhat off topic, but an observation (after catching up on political news all morning after an overseas trip last week):
I know every election always seems like the MOST IMPORTANT EVER. Certainly it has for most of my life, with the obvious exception of 1976. I also know that no matter what the result that in 4 years we’ll try it again. And also that there are those on the fringe on both sides who are convinced that “if we lose this the other side will never allow an election again.”
On the last point we can certainly point to a large number of wingnuts who speculated that Clinton would somehow stay in power and not step down after two terms, and a number who have made similar claims about Obama. I think part of the reason they say this is that when Bush was in power a lot of the same people fantasized in print about having Bush be declared President-for-life to prevent the demeaning right of running for re-election – that is, they are afraid we’ll do it because it’s something they would do themselves if they could.
I also know a lot of people on the left who were convinced after 2004 that the votes were rigged and the Democrats could never get a Congressional majority again, let alone the Presidency.
So, the fear of “if we lose this is the last election” is common on the fringes and has never been reality.
But today I was reading some links on Lawyers Guns and Money about what conservative legal watchers are hoping happens if Romney gets in and appoints replacements to two of the so-called “liberal” SCOTUS judges. And frankly it IS more than a just a little bit scary. Not that it wasn’t already scary, what with their views on women’s rights, personal privacy, and the fact that their Constitution seems to have misplaced the 4th amendment and the first half of the text of the 2nd. But these guys are openly dreaming of returning Constitutional interpretation back to the gilded age – explicitly dreaming of a Constitutional view in which laws on very basic stuff like child labor would be unconstitutional.
These are just fringe guys, right? No, these people represent the core beliefs of the judicial conservative movement that has successfully placed the large majority of federal judges over the past 3 decades. This is what they believe. Further, it has to be clear that 4 of the SCOTUS also think that way. If they get 6 Scalito clones on the court it’s over. It is all over. No more risk of Kennedy or one of the others stepping out of line – every decision will go their way.
Citizens United will seem minor in comparison. Remember that in the gilded age the Anti-Trust laws were interpreted as preventing unions but not, you know, trusts. Think of every hair-brained GOP vote prevention scheme we know of now – add in a few more as they do every 4 years – and now imagine that the SCOTUS has endorsed all of those – and, per recent precedent – they go farther and effectively create new law that goes even beyond that.
In 2000 if you said Torture and indefinite detention without due process would be openly practiced and that the SCOTUS would back that up you’d be laughed at. Well, give them two more SCOTUS judges and poll taxes will be constitutional again. And they won’t be implemented just in the south this time.
I don’t see a problem with characterizing virtually every election since 1980 as “the most important election of our lives,” considering that’s when the Religious Right teamed up with the Republicans and took advantage of the fractured coalition the Democrats suffered from in 1968 — a coalition that existed for almost the entirety of the party’s existence.
The Republicans have continued to get crazier and crazier, now we’re at a possible nadir of the Southern Strategy, and their embrace of a complete dismantlement of the welfare state. We’re essentially at a time of new realignment, but it’s hard to see when, precisely, that will happen when it’s happening in real-time.
So yes, this is “the most important election of my lifetime,” and will continue to be so until the GOP comes back to being the party of Eisenhower.
Think of it like in Office Space when Peter says, “Every day is the worst day of my life. Every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it.” That’s the Republicans since 1980: every single batch of Republicans is worse than the one before it.
My point was that we’re so used to calling every election the most important that when it actually happens – as this is – we’re numb to the idea.
Since posting that I’ve looked up the legal theory on the poll tax and it is pretty clear that from a states rights legal theory you could easily make the 24th amendment to the Constitution ineffective – as the current SCOTUS has done with most of the the 4th.
We’ll see possibly 4 SCOTUS justices replaced in the next term – two on each side, all in their upper 70s. If Romney picks them you know that the Dems won’t fight. WIth 6 Scalitos we can be sure that voting rights will be severely curtailed. There is a theory that the 24th amendment doesn’t apply to the states (the 1966 SCOTUS used the 14th amendment, which conservatives hate, to apply the 24th to the states). There is another theory that you can institute poll taxes but allow for a citizen to apply to have them waived due to hardship – on 6 months notice. VA tried that and it was thrown out in the 1960s – absolutely NO reason to think a Romney court wouldn’t reverse that.
This would solve the demographic problem for the GOP – yes, their voters are shrinking as a size of the electorate, but not a problem if you block enough of the other voters from voting.
Any reason to assume that future Obama SCOTUS nominees would be confirmed? Assuming that he nominates anyone that is to the left of Kennedy — not a bet I’d take.
Interesting question. If Obama wins the Dems will keep the Senate, which of course brings up the question of filibuster reform.
Now the GOP has of course filibustered all other judicial nominees because they know that if they keep the positions open until there is a GOP president there will be a sudden call in the Washington media for “civility” and an end to routine filibusters and a few Vichy Dems will form a gang of 14 or something and basically vote for whatever extremist they nominate. But they held off filibustering Obama’s first two SCOTUS nominees. That might have been to avoid the bad optics – I mean even the Washington Millionaire Media club would have reported on that on the nightly news. Or it might have been because in 2009-10 the Dems had between 58 and 60 Senators, at various times, and since even Benedict Lieberman wasn’t going to join a filibuster and a few old time GOP senators felt that filibusters of SCOTUS nominees were too much (remembering Clarence Thomas getting approved with only 52 votes) so a filibuster attempt would have failed.
Alas, I’m going to guess the latter. With the replacement of arch-conservative-but-still-somewhat-cooperative Senators like Bennett in Utah with wacko Tea Partiers and with 47 or so Senate seats next term I’m guessing the safe seat Tea Partiers will filibuster SCOTUS nominees on principle.
So, back to filibuster reform. A few decades ago Robert Byrd came up with two reforms – the reconciliation process that did not require a 60-person consent to vote but only on budget bills that met certain conditions – and the two-track system which was designed to allow the Senate to do business while another bill was being filibustered, but in effect ended the filibuster-as-spectacle.
I would suggest that the Democrats could make two new reforms – both in the spirit of previous reforms and of course both requiring a bare majority at the start of the term. First, nomination confirmations, like budget bills, can’t be filibustered. I’m sure some people will scream but realistically the Dems have no backbone to stop wingnut nominees to the bench or to cabinet positions anyway with the minority filibuster – Bork was beaten by an honest majority, for example. So that’s a feature that isn’t useful to our side – why not end it altogether. Second, remove the two-track system so that a filibuster requires 24×7 speeches and accompanying news coverage. The second reform is a compensation for the loss of the first – with the second the minority party can stop all business, even budget reconciliation and nominee approval, if something REALLY extreme comes up – but then only if the minority party welcomed the national news coverage that would accompany the filibuster. (“We feel people should know that the GOP is trying to de-fund Sesame Street”, as a humorous example.)
If that happened then the decades of right wing stacking of the judiciary could be rolled back to a great extent in one term.
Will that happen? Given our milktoast party, who knows, but these things are being proposed.
As you demonstrated, attempting to think through but a couple of the possible scenarios isn’t easy.
Bernie Sanders was talking about the filibuster on Thom Hartmann’s show on Friday. IIRC, he said that most Presidents, including Clinton, averaged having one filibuster per year. Bush had ten filibusters against hiis programs and nominees. Obama has had 320 filibusters against him!
Well, there’s the fact the he nominated two judges who were to the left of Kennedy, and they were both confirmed.
Notice any changes in the composition of the Senate since those two confirmations?
Notice anything on your calendar for next Tuesday?
The most important election is in fact 2014. If we have mastered GOTV, we should not let those skills disappear in an off-year election.
This year is important in seeing whether the Democratic establishment has learned that lesson. The doctrine of inevitable off-year losses is a great self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second issue is whether Democrats can stop playing defense against conservatism and start putting forth their positive vision again. Will a win in November mean Simpson-Bowles in December as many on the left believe?
There are three types of racist responses in the US. The first is among folks who do not want to deal with folks who are different but are forced to every day. The second is among folks who have the “luxury” of being “exclusive”, of self-segregating. The third are those who never have had to deal with folks who are different and don’t want to start now. There are geographical enclaves of all three types.
The first most often is encountered in the South or in areas near large Hispanic communities or in Indian country. The second inhabit certain of the suburbs that ring every major and medium-sized city in the US–from Wasilla to Anoka MN to Long Island to Palm Beach — how’s that for a geographic and socio-cultural spread. The third are in places like Appalachia, parts of the Mountain West, and the northern tier of communities from Spokane to Sault St. Marie.
It is only when there is a coalition of these communities that Republicans win anymore. There are places where it looks more religious than racist; scratch the religion and guess what you find.
And where that coalition gains traction–Georgia is an excellent example where there are all three types–it affects elections by diverting voters from other issues that might find salient.
The very strange this is that in all of these three communities there are large numbers of people working to end racism. Often politics comes down to intimidation (we have seen some classics by employers in the recent week or so), social pressure (think those racist jokes are about “humor”?), and in extreme cases terrorism (the murder of abortion doctors was about racist rightwing politics, not religion). We look at the Republican term “culture war” and think Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh and…. There are however folks who think that (1) there is a war and (2) it is for the survival of their culture, no matter how nebulously held in their own minds.
American politics has been Borked. And the powers that be are throwing everything they have – money, media, shenanigans in the next week to make sure that America stays Borked. (Yes, Palm Beach County–again; how come those Democrats can’t get competent election officials?)
The actual numbers better come out a blowout or the Republican legal beagles will dog every single race and we might see 50, 80, 100 situations like Al Franken’s in 2008.
I like your post. I’m selecting only one sentence to comment on but that doesn’t mean the rest of it wasn’t worth reading and contemplating.
There are places where it looks more religious than racist; scratch the religion and guess what you find.
Yes, but not always. I really don’t like hanging out with evangelicals but a few times I’ve been put in that situation – living not far Colorado Springs that isn’t unusual.
There was one period in particular, back in 2006, where I made a weekly trek to the New Life Church once per week for a couple months. I thought of this for the first time in a long time today in response to another post. You probably have heard of this – in November 2006 the founding preacher, Ted Haggard, was exposed for habits of meth and sex with Gay prostitutes and it made national news.
Well, the place is as big as a mall, literally with shops and a big cafe. They have a very large classroom wing and they rent those classrooms out to anyone who wants – yep, you can learn all about the details of biological evolution a few hundred feet from where the preachers will tell you that evolution was a lie.
So I was dropping people off for classes and hanging out at the really nice cafe – with free wifi – during this time. It was hard to focus on work sometimes – the evangelical conversations I heard were incredibly enlightening.
I think the guy who wrote The Authoritarians is on target. The leaders of the wingnut movement are indeed SDOs – social dominance orientation – sociopaths. And that’s who you see represent the movement. But the rank and file are RWAs – right wing authoritarians. No, not authoritarian as in they want to be the king – they desperately want someone else to be the king. They want to follow.
I have never sat and listened to a more fearful bunch of sheep in my life. Young and old and middle aged. Lonely – a lot of signs of loneliness. The big box church offers a certain appeal. Unlike a smaller church you can walk in and no one questions why you are there – it’s like a mall, as I said. You can browse the book store, hang out in the coffee shop, eventually attend a sermon, then finally join up when you’ve worked up the courage. At that point you are LOVED – you are ACCEPTED – you are ONE OF US. Well, make sure you make your monthly payment, but we understand if things get tight. You’re in our prayers. We have lots of activities for you if you get lonely. Just use the code words, such as Praise the Lord.
Of course, if you want to be part of an IN group there has to be and OUT group – and that’s all the stuff you’re afraid of. Different music, different lifestyles, different ethnicities, DIFFERENT. NOT ONE OF US.
I understand from later readings that the majority of big box church members float from church to church over time … they never quite fit in anywhere, but they have the illusion of fitting in everywhere. This matches what I’ve seen.
For these people racism is real, it’s there, but it’s a symptom of something larger.
I think that’s general true of the three types of communities I’ve described. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community took a try at identifying what that something larger is. It paints with too broad a brush but does have some interesting insights.
What I was thinking of is how anxiety over morality is so tied to racism. In the South, the failure of personal morality and “coming to Jeezus” was the reason for the Civil War. The anxiety about abortion in the South runs along the lines of “there are white women who have experienced miscarriages who would love to have kids and these sluts and trailer trash are going and getting the government to pay for their abortions while they act without personal responsibility.” And that gets coupled with the assertion that blacks just want a handout and lack personal responsibility. And then the crowning argument is that it is because of a lack of morality which comes from the fact that no one’s religious enough anymore because of a Supreme Court decision in 1960. A Supreme Court decision, by the way, that covered for the real Supreme Court decision that white folks were angered by; “the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds.”
And politically, it was Baptist segregationist Jerry Falwell who was among those in 1978 who engineered the Southern Baptist-Roman Catholic alliance to put Ronald Reagan in the White House, an effort called the Moral Majority. (Making false claims in both cases) And like the entrepreneurial preachers looking for the socially lost, they unified those folks into a political force. And did in the name of another American “Great Awakening”.
Like I said, scratch the religion and what do you find. A bunch of lost loners being used. They are being led around by that “something larger”.
This is where the Democratic party needs think tanks and research groups instead of just field operatives on blogs and volunteering locally. There has to be some way to bring those loners into the left wing party which actually helps people as its raison d^etre, not as a means to an electoral end.
Huh? Huh? Huh?
This is where grassroots democrats need to get out and actually talk to their neighbors and co-workers. You don’t build authentic social networks with think tanks and research groups and messaging.
Different people have different reasons for being loners, but the conservative framing makes sure that folks who self-identify as religious or patriotic or lovers of liberty see conservatives as their only social network. And that the opinions get preset firmly so that real political discussion cannot happen. You know, a common search for the truth about an issue and coming to a common understanding of how to deal with it–democratic decision-making.
Both parties see their members as means to electing candidates and obtaining financing to keep the party going. Neither is really about helping people. Institutions grow so large and entrenched that their internal conversations take importance over the conversations with the rest of the world.
Both are necessary. People working in the field are essential but a coherent long-term strategy – based on extensive research and data – ultimately makes the field work 10x as effective.
Democrats approach each election as an end in itself. We approach most policy battles with the goal of reducing the erosion in progressive gains from 1933-1980. (There are a few exceptions, notably gay rights and health care, where a number of policy gains have been made the last few years.) The best you can say for our long term vision was Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy, which is pretty simple: compete everywhere and eventually you’ll see progress.
The GOP has had the advantage of dozens of think tanks and research institutions. A lot of their output is just verbal bullcrap, like what you read on townhall.com if you have the misfortune to visit that site, but there is also a lot of research and development on ideas and strategies for long term gain. Not every idea has worked for them – indeed most did not – but enough have been successful that they are way ahead.
Some of this has been the way they organize institutions that talk to people and recruit them to their side, as they do with the fundie industry. Some of it is influencing public debate – remember they failed with the smoking-does-not-cause-cancer campaign but learned from that and now have a huge success (for them) in topics as varied as global warming, creationism, and public perceptions of the role of government in things like health care. Yes, we rightly disparage this industry as Paid Liars, and woudn’t want to emulate them, but against their incredibly well organized and highly research-based liars we have an army of volunteers. It’s like modern tanks against muskets.
Consider the fact, well known on this site, that Obamacare, the bain of the GOP base right now, was a Heritage Foundation proposal in 1993. Just think about what they’ve accomplished here. 17 years after it was proposed it became law – in the interim it went from being seen as the conservative solution to seen as the liberal solution – the window shifted rightward.
Is there anything comparable on the left? Do we have any foundations making detailed, well-researched proposals and promoting them for long-term success? For anything?
Have you ever read “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein? Doesn’t this sound like the Fosterite Church?
Was that the Church of the Holy Granfaloon?
Church of the New Revelation. It was founded by a huckster named Foster who bears a resemblance to Joseph Smith. The “Inner Circle” were eternally saved and could thus do no sin. If they engaged in a wife-swapping bacchanal, that was “God’s Will”.