Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

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Although Obama polls ahead of Edwards (and Clinton sometimes) in the whole country, below the Mason-Dixon, it appears he still comes in as second or third. To the white folk.

From a blog:
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There are a number of signals pointing to difficulties for Obama in the South.

In national surveys of white voters, conducted by television networks and newspapers, Obama has generally run ahead of John Edwards and behind Hillary Clinton. In the South, however, Edwards has run consistently ahead of Obama among whites.

Confirming Obama's relative vulnerability in the South is MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the nation's leading experts on public opinion surveys who has helped coordinate a huge academically-based data collection program, including 10,000 interviews conducted in December. He found that "Obama comes in third among the white southern Democrats. Clinton gets 36 percent, Edwards 24 percent and Obama 17 percent." This amounts to a 19 point spread between Clinton and Obama, and a significant 7 point spread between Edwards and Obama.

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Any commentary about how the "real racism" is mostly in the Northern states in modern America?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/19/obama-faces-white-resista_n_82300.html

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I'll let others comment on whether or not southern whites are a bunch of racist crackers. The fact remains, however, that the Democratic Party simply doesn't need their votes. Kerry could have won the 2004 election simply by carrying Ohio, even though he didn't win a single southern state. Gore could have won simply by carrying New Hampshire, even though he too didn't win a single state south of the Mason-Dixon line. It's certainly not a new idea, but it remains true that the Democrats don't need the south to win the White House.

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Democrat voters in the South include a large majority or plurality (depending on the state) of black voters. Does Obama's relative lack of success there - as indicated in polls & surveys which themselves have proven to be rather unreliable - necessarily imply that it is the opposition of white Democrats that makes such a large difference?

It appears to me that Snood's conclusion ..."To the white folk" is both unconfirmed by the reference data, and itself somewhat racist.

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Without getting into what is and what is not racism, I had decided to vote for Clinton before Obama became a factor. If it means anything at all now, I will point out that I voted for Jesse Jackson in one Texas primary, and would vote for him again. I would also willingly vote for Obama if he became nominee. Hopefully, he and Hillary will be on one ticket, in the final vote.

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Of course racism is alive and well in the South. That said, Edwards is a native son, so I would expect that he polls stronger there.

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The South ceased to be a Democratic bastion with the election of Reagan, and the cracks had appeared even before 1980. These numbers are no indicator of more racism among Southerners than among Northerners. Racism is alive and well everywhere in the country, which includes blacks who hate white boys just because they're white.

This is really a poor effort, Snood.

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I'd be interested to see a breakdown of the data by age.

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Re: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

snood wrote:

There are a number of signals pointing to difficulties for Obama in the South.

I've posted lots about this in the Polls etc thread..

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Setanta wrote:

The South ceased to be a Democratic bastion with the election of Reagan, and the cracks had appeared even before 1980. These numbers are no indicator of more racism among Southerners than among Northerners. Racism is alive and well everywhere in the country, which includes blacks who hate white boys just because they're white.

This is really a poor effort, Snood.

I think that Obama is polling lower among whites in the South than in the rest of the country. I think it is because old attitudes die hard. I didn't make up the numbers, and I am entitled to my opinion.

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nimh wrote:

I've posted lots about this in the Polls etc thread..

Sorry, lemme make a less lazy effort.

First off, you can read more about what the breakdown of poll results from South Carolina by race shows here (and the post below), with a recent update here.

Turns out that when it comes to SC, Snood is exactly right that Obama "still comes in as second or third .. to the white folk". Obama was up at around 30% of the white vote just after the Iowa caucuses, but has since dropped to 20%. Far behind Hillary, and behind Edwards as well.

The drop may have occurred because of how Hillary's campaign has brought race into the discussion - it was accompanied by a rise in his support among blacks. It may also be that he enjoyed a brief post-Iowa bounce that persisted among blacks but dissipated again among whites. Either way, Snood's characterisation holds for SC - judging on the polls, at least.

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Perhaps so, however the question of just what may be behind the presumed relative slippage in Obama's expectations - is it declining support among black or white voters, or both ? - appears to me at least to be unanswered and as yet quite unknown.

There are many possibilities here, and a mild general retraction following a rapid, and at the time, unexpected, spike appears to me as well to be a likely possibility. Seems a bit early in the game here to be casting broad accusations of racism and bad intent among large segments of the population -- if for no other reason than because the votes haven't yet been cast or counted. I can understand and empathize with Snood's suspicions, but I certainly don't accept his conclusion.

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The second thing is more on a related note. I know that the article this threads starts with is about how Obama is running more weakly among white voters in the South than elsewhere in the Democratic primaries, specifically. It provides polling data to show so.

Taking a step on from that, I've also seen indications of Obama's apparent relative weakness compared to Hillary among the overall electorate in the South - a weakness that does not seem to appear in the same way elsewhere in the country. That emerged from a set of tables I posted listing all the polls on hypothetical match-ups between Hillary and Obama as Democratic contenders against the various Republican frontrunners.

I posted the tables for the different races - how Obama and Hillary did, respectively, against Giuliani, how they did against Romney, etc - here last month; for example here for Giuliani. They basically contained all the state-level polls from October through December. I used colour codings to indicate which states would be strongly Democrat (blue), leaning Democrat (light blue) etc, if Hillary was the nominee, and if Obama was the nominee.

Then in the end, I was pondering about the patterns in them, and to make them clearer I created a table directly comparing how each race would "color up" for Hillary and Obama. And that led to the surprising conclusion:

Quote:

Hillary does strikingly better [against the Republican contenders] in the polls now than Kerry did in the 2004 elections in Missouri, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. [..] Hillary also does particularly better than Kerry did in her home state Arkansas - except when facing Huckabee, who's also from there; and to a lesser extent in Alabama and Oklahoma [..].

Obama does strikingly better in the polls now than Kerry did in the elections in 2004 in Iowa, Missouri and Virginia. [But] Obama does not apparently do particularly better than Kerry in the other Southern states where Hillary does clearly outdo Kerry's result. Not in TN, KY, AR, AL or OK.

You can see the table and read more about it here.

I didnt do any speculation of why that might be so in that post, but I did when the subject returned in the Obama thread. There, I concluded:

nimh wrote:

When respondents are asked to choose between Hillary and [name of Republican], or between Obama and [name of Republican], there's no doubt that Southern black respondents massively opt for the Democrat in either case; that's not where the difference is. So if Hillary has been doing clearly better than Obama in these match-ups in the South, it's because of a chunk of white voters being ready for Hillary but not for Obama.

The old racism I suppose. Hopefully it can be overcome, but those numbers just suggest that Obama would have a higher mountain to climb there than Hillary. Harold Ford's experience in TN wasnt exactly encouraging, though Ford was no Obama of course. Then again, the lack of data (especially on Obama) should allow for some ambiguity still too.

Meanwhile, I posted a new update covering Survey USA polls from January here. It again shows Hillary matching up against the various Republicans better than Obama in red states in the South; while it shows Obama matching up better than Hillary in the blue states. All a little counterintuitive, perhaps, but it's quite a body of polls showing so now.

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georgeob1 wrote:

There are many possibilities here, and a mild general retraction following a rapid, and at the time, unexpected, spike appears to me as well to be a likely possibility.

Yes, that is a possibility - I've been wanting to expand that table of data for how the Democratic primary polls in SC break down by race to include data from December as well. It could be that the slippage of Obama's support among white South Carolinans from about 30% to about 20% in the course of this month may just be the dissipation of an immediate post-Iowa bounce. For example, if the December polls show his support among whites at 20% as well, then you have another narrative: it's at 20%, goes up to 30% after Obama's Iowa win, then drops back to 20% again.

However, that would in turn merely raise the question, why did the Iowa bounce dissipate among whites, but not among blacks? Because among those he appears to just keep on rising.

Moreover, either way the most basic point remains the same: namely, that among whites in SC Obama runs in third place - behind Edwards as well as Hillary. And the 20% he's getting among those whites in SC is distinctly less than what he got against Hillary and Edwards among white Democrats in Iowa, New Hampshire, and now Nevada. It's also distinctly less than what he's polling among whites in California, or nationally for that matter.*

So the observation that white Democrats in SC like Obama less than white Democrats in a couple of other early primary states, all of whom outside the South, holds. And this is what the original article observed on a larger scale (see next post).

*(The exceptions are NY and NJ, where Obama runs very weakly against Hillary period, because its her hometurf.)

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Setanta wrote:

The South ceased to be a Democratic bastion with the election of Reagan, and the cracks had appeared even before 1980.

But how is that relevant? The polling numbers the article quotes are specifically about white Democratic primary voters. Here:

Quote:

Confirming Obama's relative vulnerability in the South is MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the nation's leading experts on public opinion surveys who has helped coordinate a huge academically-based data collection program, the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, including 10,000 interviews conducted in December. He found that "Obama comes in third among the white southern Democrats. Clinton gets 36 percent, Edwards 24 percent and Obama 17 percent." This amounts to a 19 point spread between Clinton and Obama, and a significant 7 point spread between Edwards and Obama.

And here, where the article is going on a string of recent primary polls:

Quote:

While Obama is expected to pick up one out of five white Democratic primary voters, his margin among such voters in this deep Southern state lags from three to fourteen percentage points behind his support among whites nationally, depending on the survey. This lag, which appears at present to hold across the entire South, challenges one of the central claims of the Obama campaign: that he is a more viable general election candidate than Hillary Clinton.

So this is not about Southern whites having come to opt for the Republicans over the Democrats, but about those who remain Democratic voters opting for Hillary and Edwards over Obama.

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Now, on the other hand, if you dont want to (only) look at lingering racial prejudice to explain this, I suppose there could be demographic explanations as well - but I dont have the knowledge that you'd need to have about demography in the South to make them.

E.g., Hillary's base (and to a lesser extent Edwards' too) is strongly among those with less education, lower income, among the older age groups, among union households, among those who are pessimistic about their economic outlook and who think the economy is the most pressing issue, those who look for a leader who "cares for people like you". These are all categories that Obama, so far, has done relatively weakly in.

So hypothetically, if you could argue that a larger share of white Democratic primary voters in the South falls into those categories than of white Democratic primary voters elsewhere, then you could argue that this could explain a lot of Obama's weakness among Southern whites compared to whites in New Hampshire or Nevada or whatnot. But I havent got a clue about that, myself - I dont know enough about demography in the South, let alone among white Southern Democrats specifically.

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Re: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

snood wrote:

Although Obama polls ahead of Edwards (and Clinton sometimes) in the whole country, below the Mason-Dixon, it appears he still comes in as second or third. To the white folk.

From a blog:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There are a number of signals pointing to difficulties for Obama in the South.

In national surveys of white voters, conducted by television networks and newspapers, Obama has generally run ahead of John Edwards and behind Hillary Clinton. In the South, however, Edwards has run consistently ahead of Obama among whites.

Confirming Obama's relative vulnerability in the South is MIT political scientist Stephen Ansolabehere, one of the nation's leading experts on public opinion surveys who has helped coordinate a huge academically-based data collection program, including 10,000 interviews conducted in December. He found that "Obama comes in third among the white southern Democrats. Clinton gets 36 percent, Edwards 24 percent and Obama 17 percent." This amounts to a 19 point spread between Clinton and Obama, and a significant 7 point spread between Edwards and Obama.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Any commentary about how the "real racism" is mostly in the Northern states in modern America?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/19/obama-faces-white-resista_n_82300.html

Who would have believed it?

Snood has proven that the Old Dixiecrats live on and that white Democrats are still racists after all.

I guarantee you that Obama is not leading in national Republican polls and so there's reason to believe Southern Republicans are racist when it is revealed in polls that they do not want Obama to be president.

This is what you are suggesting snood, that Southern Whites who consider themselves Democrat enough to vote for Edwards and Clinton will not vote for Obama because he is black. Gosh, racism must be part of the Dixie DNA if even Southern Liberals in 2008 are racist.

It can't be that Edwards is a Southerner and Obama is a Northerner?

It can't be that Southern Democrats who tend to be slightly less liberal than their northern fellows see Obama as the most liberal of the three.

By this logic I guess we should conclude that the folks in Iowa and New Hampshire don't like Italians because Gulianni was leading in national polls going into those two contests.

I guess we also need to conclude that New Hampshire Democrats are racist because Obama was leading in their polls before the primary was run. The Bradley Factor at work?

Does this mean that each time Obama does not win a primary we can expect insinuations of racism, or are you just trying to lower expectations for your guy in South Carolina?

It would indeed be very unfortunate if one of the outcomes of what is a positive historical event in America actually increases racial tensions in the country. Does the Obama experience demonstrate an advancement in attitudes about race in this country only if he actually wins?

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Re: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Gosh, racism must be part of the Dixie DNA if even Southern Liberals in 2008 are racist.

It wouldnt be about Southern Liberals, who are only a minority among Southern Democrats anyhow.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

It can't be that Edwards is a Southerner and Obama is a Northerner?

Possibly. But how would you classify Hillary? Southerner or Northerner? Cause she does a lot better than Obama among Southern whites - much more so than among whites in, say, NH, NV, IA...

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Re: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

nimh wrote:

Finn dAbuzz wrote:
Gosh, racism must be part of the Dixie DNA if even Southern Liberals in 2008 are racist.

It wouldnt be about Southern Liberals, who are only a minority among Southern Democrats anyhow.

Oh, I guess you must be right since we know all true Liberals would only vote for Obama, or whatever balck candidate was running [color]

[quote="Finn dAbuzz"]It can't be that Edwards is a Southerner and Obama is a Northerner?

Possibly. But how would you classify Hillary? Southerner or Northerner? Cause she does a lot better than Obama among Southern whites - much more so than among whites in, say, NH, NV, IA...[/quote]

I don't classify Hillary as a Southerner, but a surprising number of people do because of her extended stay in Arkansas. She does as well - when she is the South ---- just listen to her accent change.

In any case if there are very few Southern Liberals, it's not a surprise that Southern Democrats would favor the least liberal candidates, irrespective of race.

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According to NBC exit polls, in the Dem Nevada Caucuses,

Clinton received 52% of whites votes (White votes were 65% of all votes)
Obama received 34% of white votes

Clinton received 14% of black votes (Black votes were 15% of all votes)
Obama received 83% of black votes

Clinton received 64% of latino votes (Latino votes were 15% of all votes)
Obama received 26% of latino votes
What do these results tell us?

Black and latino voters in these caucuses are more racist than their white counterparts?

During the past couple of nights I was surprised to hear several different TV pundits express (in almost a stage whisper) the supposedly accepted "fact" that latinos generally will not vote for black candidates. Apparently this a more acknowledged phenomenon than I would have thought. I guess I'm just naive.

NYT Article

SIDENOTE: Interestingly enough in the above linked article Obama expresses this opinion:

"Nationally, people don't know that record (his with latinos) quite as well."

So national polls are not as accurate or relevant as local polls?

Do the Dem latino votes in Nevada support the basic presumption that latinos won't vote for black candidates?

34% of White Nevada Dems voted for Obama - 8 percentage points higher than latinos. Does this mean that Whites Dems in Nevada are less racist than their latino counterparts?

And what do we make of the black vote?

In late November and early December, Clinton led Obama, nationally, in terms of black support by 14% It is my understanding that this trend played out in Nevada as well. Now she's 25 points behind him and look at the disparity in the black vote in Nevada.

Does this mean that a couple of months ago we had a false impression that black voters were able to look beyond race in formulating a decision about who should lead the country? Is the reality that they cannot? Is this racism?

We can draw a lot of conclusions from polls, not all of them correct. It just seems to me that to be taken seriously, someone who chooses to use poll results to draw conclusions should be consistent in terms of how he or she applies the poll results to all related issues.

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You know a couple of months ago I never would have thought I would say this; but I think McCain is going to win. He is not black, nor a woman nor a Mormon. I think snood is right after all; old times are not forgotten.

(I am just so disappointed in Bill Clinton I can't see straight this morning; what is worse is that I don't think he is racist but he is willing to use the racist card which makes it worse in my opinion. This is a little over board; but it almost breaks my heart. Getting ready for snide comments about my silliness...)

Moreover he (McCain) seems to get votes from both the anti-war crowd and the military crowd and the moderate crowd (not evangelist). If I had to pick a republican; I can live with McCain without having to spend the next four or eight years dissing him. I think once he gets president; he might not be ultra conservative. It is risky bet but better than the other alternatives in the republican candidates. Not that I am going to vote for him. I am not sure; but in the end; probably will vote for whoever ends up in the democratic slot for domestic reasons.

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revel wrote:

You know a couple of months ago I never would have thought I would say this; but I think McCain is going to win. He is not black, nor a woman nor a Mormon. I think snood is right after all; old times are not forgotten.

(I am just so disappointed in Bill Clinton I can't see straight this morning; what is worse is that I don't think he is racist but he is willing to use the racist card which makes it worse in my opinion. This is a little over board; but it almost breaks my heart. Getting ready for snide comments about my silliness...)

Moreover he (McCain) seems to get votes from both the anti-war crowd and the military crowd and the moderate crowd (not evangelist). If I had to pick a republican; I can live with McCain without having to spend the next four or eight years dissing him. I think once he gets president; he might not be ultra conservative. It is risky bet but better than the other alternatives in the republican candidates. Not that I am going to vote for him. I am not sure; but in the end; probably will vote for whoever ends up in the democratic slot for domestic reasons.

Do you believe that a vote for McCain is representative of disregard or disdain for blacks, women, or Mormans? This seems to be what you are suggesting by the comment "I think snood is right after all; old times are not forgotten."

I'm not sure how someone employing tactics of racism can be considered anything other than a racist.

BTW I don't think there is anything silly about being deeply disappointed in Bill Clinton. He seems to have that effect on his supporters.

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Old Times There Are Not Forgotten

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