okie wrote:there is always the element of them telling you what is politically correct.
Absolutely. That's why I believe that if, for example, one in five white voters in West-Virginia and Kentucky say they voted for Hillary at least partly because of the candidates' race, you can bet your life that the number in reality is only
larger.
Blacks (or whites!) voting
for the black candidate at least partly because of his race, on the other hand, is not very politically incorrect, is it? If anything, it's actually quite PC - the kind of thing your average liberal would only all too eagerly admit to.
So I think - but this is just a guess on my part - that the exit polls underestimate the number of people who vote
against Obama because he's black by much more than they underestimate the number of people who voted
for him because he's black. So if already now, the number voting against him because of race is higher than the number of those voting for him because of race, well... then race is probably even more of a net loss for him in reality.
Which brings me to your other question:
okie wrote:nimh, how many people are voting FOR Obama because of race, including white and black? Do you have data for that? I think alot of whites are voting for Obama because of race.
Yeah, that would be the same data. I went through the data for this question back up to the March 4 primaries, and here's what I found.
(Note how this data is different from that in the table I posted earlier tonight in the Polls etc thread: that table was only about
whites who said race was an important factor in their choice, this table is about all voters who said so.)
In short, race has only really yielded Obama votes in the two states where blacks made up a third or more of the primary voters, Mississippi and North-Carolina. There, blacks who voted for Obama at least partly because of race apparently clearly outnumbered whites who voted against him at least partly because of it.
Voters in the socially liberal states of Vermont and Oregon also yielded a net few votes for Obama on race, but negligeable amounts because there just werent many voters there for whom it was an important factor.
Meanwhile, Hillary reaped significant amounts of votes on the basis of race in all the other states.
In Ohio and Pennsylvania, even if you look at all voters and not just white ones, those voting for Hillary for whom race was an important consideration outnumbered those who voted for Obama at least partly because of race by a margin of 20 percentage points. In Rhode Island they did so by 30 points; and in Kentucky and West-Virginia by 65-70 points.
When you translate those leads in numbers of votes, you're talking about a
net 50-100 thousand votes she won in almost each of those states from those who called race an important factor in their choice.