US elections 2008: voting behaviour and race

You must have been resident on the moon over the previous 48 hours not to have noted that Barack Obama has settled on Joe Biden as his choice of running mate. See the video of the announcement here But the focus of this posting is the issue of race. Two words that every US Politics student will be wise to include in their essays on voting behaviour are ‘Bradley effect’. I have found that Barack Obama’s race is something that black Americans have been far more willing to talk about than whites. A number of articles in today’s papers look at the issue in depth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/24/barackobama.democrats20081Paul Harris writes:

‘The question of this election is race. The answer we are looking for is, how much will it matter?’ said Professor Shawn Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California at Riverside. America will soon find out. When Obama speaks on Thursday to more than 80,000 people in Denver’s football stadium he will also reach a television audience of millions of Americans. They will look into the face of a man who could be their next President and for the first time it will be a black face.

By the end of this week, America will finally be facing up to the question that might truly define the 2008 presidential race: is America ready to elect a black President to the White House?

His popularity is huge among blacks and strong with Hispanics and young white voters. Yet his support struggles among older white voters, including many Democrats. Among Clinton Democrats, one fifth say they are backing McCain rather than Obama. It may be these voters care about ‘experience’ or other issues more than black or Hispanic or young voters. Or it might be that they are simply resistant to voting for a black man to be President, whether they know it or not. Whatever the truth, securing a decent percentage of the white vote is going to be fundamental to Obama’s hopes.

In research published in New York magazine, the pollster Thom Riehle, who founded the AP/Ipsos survey, calculates that even if the black turnout were to rise by 25 per cent from 2004, with Obama gaining a 92 per cent share, and significantly more Hispanic voters and under-50s voted for Obama than voted for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004, he would still need to win 40 per cent of the white vote - just one point less than Kerry got. As Riehle points out: ‘This is a daunting task as the first black candidate for President. To get there, he’s got to win roughly the same proportion of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents that all other Democrats get. If he doesn’t he’s in a world of trouble. He can’t win it just by changing the electorate.’
The polls themselves may be unreliable. In the past, support for African-American candidates when Americans actually cast their votes has often failed to reflect what voters told the pollsters. Most notoriously, former Mayor of Los Angeles Tom Bradley, in his unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Los Angeles [California, actually], came up short in a manner no one could have predicted having followed his poll ratings. American pollsters now talk about the Bradley effect.

There is little doubt that race is going to play a starring role in this election after the convention season. ‘It has not been too much of an issue so far. Or, at least not talked about. But that is not going to last,’ said Bowler. It is already getting a lot of play on conservative talkshows and in books. Rush Limbaugh, the ‘shock jock’ who is hugely popular with white conservatives, has stepped up race-baiting on his broadcasts. He recently claimed Democrats chose Obama as a sort of ‘affirmative action’ programme. ‘I think it really goes back to the fact that nobody had the guts to stand up and say no to a black guy,’ he told his millions of listeners. Warming to his theme a few days later, he said: ‘You can’t criticise the little black man-child.’

Patricia Williams, Professor of Law at Columbia University, adds:

‘At the same time the civil rights movement has given us a moral conscience that was not as prevalent when The Birth of a Nation was made. Today it’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of white Americans ‘hate to say it aloud’ because they also hate to think of themselves as racists. Yet the tendency to turn the commitment to racial liberalism into sheer denial is strong. ‘I don’t see race’ becomes ‘I don’t see racism’. While some of us are listening to the soothing tones of National Public Radio, a far larger audience is listening to the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh singing about subterranean fears of ‘Barack, the magic Negro’, or to shock jocks cackling about ‘jigaboos’. Not that any of them mean it in a racist way. Hey, lighten up. Don’t you have a sense of humour?

Then there are the very real disparities that burden the lives of the majority of blacks, people of colour and the poor in this country: from the still unrepaired wake of Hurricane Katrina to the greater infant mortality rate and lesser life span, to near double-digit rates of unemployment, to the fact that blacks in New York are eight times more likely than whites to be stopped for marijuana possession, to disproportionately high rates of foreclosures and homelessness among blacks, Native Americans and Latinos, to the almost complete resegregation of schools across the land, to a war on drugs so shockingly racialised and so aggressively executed that our rates of incarceration place us first in the world.’

And Andrew Rawnsley also comments on the race issue:

‘It seems a paradox, but perhaps it is not, that race is the hardest thing for America to talk about during its first election in which a black man is a serious contender for the presidency. The American media are tentative about approaching the subject and unsure how to measure the extent to which it will affect the outcome. When it comes to race, voters habitually lie to pollsters. Racial prejudice can be bundled into and hidden behind other arguments for not putting Obama inside the Oval Office. When voters tell pollsters or reporters that he is too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief, they may sincerely believe that or they may really be saying that they think he is too black. Some pollsters guess that as many as one in five white voters who would vote Democrat won’t do so because of his skin colour.

The furore over Jeremiah Wright drew from Obama his brilliant speech about race back in March, but since then he has tried to avoid being drawn on America’s most difficult topic of conversation. He does not want the race for the White House to be consumed by an argument about race in America because the eruption of that debate is most likely to repel precisely the sort of white voters he now needs to win.

I gained a deeper appreciation of his dilemma after spending the past three weeks travelling through a trio of southern states: Georgia and the Carolinas, North and South. The handsome houses of Charleston and Savannah which were built on the back of slavery now earn dollars by bringing in tourists to admire the beauty of the views and hear versions of the history of the old South which are sometimes much too beautified. The Civil War is both long past and still very present. The first flag of the rebel slave states flies alongside the Stars and Stripes from many of Charleston’s buildings. As recently as two years ago, the Southern Jack was still hoist over the state legislature. The owner of one cafe had not finished pouring my coffee before she was telling me in precise detail how her town had been burnt down by the Union general, William Sherman.

There are reminders here that white and black Americans often lead parallel lives today. South Carolina has a large black population, but the Americans vacationing on the beaches of the upscale resort of Hilton Head were almost uniformly coloured pink.

Very rarely did I find anyone ready to say out loud that they didn’t want a black President. What I did quite often listen to were people saying that their workmates or their neighbours or America was not ready for a black President.’