Minority Reports - After New Hampshire, a hint of racial politics (The New Yorker)

Minority Reports

After New Hampshire, a hint of racial politics

by Ryan Lizza
January 21, 2008



The brief interregnum between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary may be remembered as a time when it appeared that the magical qualities ascribed to Barack Obama included an ability to suspend all the ordinary rules of politics. Everything about Obama’s Iowa triumph seemed to defy history and shred doubts about his candidacy, including his relative lack of Washington experience. Relying on college kids to win a race normally controlled by geriatrics was thought to be tactical folly. Obama, though, won a majority of voters under thirty, who, according to the Obama campaign, made up nine per cent of the Iowa electorate in 2004 and climbed to twenty-two per cent this year. It was also a tenet of conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton had a tight grip on female voters, and yet Obama beat her by five points among women. Following in the path of Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, and Howard Dean, Obama was typed as the candidate of Starbucks liberals (latte having long ago replaced Chardonnay in the iconography of the pundits), someone with little working-class appeal who could never break out of the demographic borders of the young and well educated. But, remarkably, in Iowa he fought Hillary Clinton to a draw among union households and bested John Edwards and Clinton among Independents and Republicans. Furthermore, the results in Iowa seemed to affirm the idea that Obama’s exotic Kansan-Kenyan ancestry was not a liability but an asset, a visual reminder of the kind of transformation he preaches.

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Did Obama experience a similar fate in New Hampshire? The evidence is murky, but his campaign believes the question is important enough to warrant study. When I asked a senior Obama adviser whether the Bradley effect was a possible explanation for the gap between the final poll numbers, which showed Obama leading by an average of eight points, and the ultimate outcome, he replied, “Definitely.” He added, “If so, then the question is: what’s different between Iowa and New Hampshire? It could be that the socially acceptable thing in front of your neighbor at a caucus could be different than what you do in a secret ballot. Obviously, that’s something we’re going to be trying to figure out as we go forward, primarily through polling. I know people are working on ways of asking questions about getting at people’s attitudes about race. We’re working on this.”

Since most voters won’t admit to having any racial bias, Obama’s campaign will have to be more creative with the questions they ask. Keith Reeves, a political scientist at Swarthmore, has studied the Bradley effect closely. In order to test for racial bias, he asked white voters about their attitudes toward welfare and blacks. Using a scale of one to seven, voters were asked to say if blacks as a group were more likely “to prefer to be self-supporting” or “to live on welfare.” Reeves told me, “That ends up being a very interesting predictor of how whites feel about African-Americans as a group but also whether they transpose those feelings onto the African-American who is running. It’s less likely to lend itself to social-desirability bias. Whites can answer that question without being seen as racist.”

Reeves says that there’s no evidence yet of the Bradley effect operating in New Hampshire, but at least one of the conditions normally associated with the phenomenon was present: lots of undecided voters. “The voting booth is tantamount to the confessional—it’s the secrecy of the ballot that is the critical issue,” Reeves said. “One thing we found that was surprising was when you have instances of a fairly large percentage of undecided white voters, they flee to the white candidate. I’ve been looking at the polling on Obama, and there was a sizable amount of undecided voters at the end.”

Other pollsters who study this question are convinced that the Bradley effect is a vanishing vestige of the nineteen-eighties. David Bositis, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, points out that Obama’s percentage of the vote on primary day was identical to the average percentage he was receiving in preëlection polls. “The problem in the polling was entirely in their estimates for Hillary Clinton,” Bositis said. “There was absolutely no Bradley effect, and there has not been a Bradley effect for many years.” He went on to cite recent statewide elections featuring a black candidate against a white candidate: “For instance, Harold Ford, Jr.,’s polling in Tennessee was perfect. The public polls called the race perfectly when Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts. Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania, Blackwell in Ohio. All of their estimates were very good. It’s not that white people are not going to vote for a black candidate. That is so yesterday.”

He may be right, but the fact that Obama’s campaign thinks the problem is worth further inquiry and that race has once again become the subject of widespread chatter could be an ominous development for his candidacy. The best hope for an Obama victory was to kill the race issue in the crib of Iowa and New Hampshire, both of which have overwhelmingly white electorates. Racial politics have been refreshingly absent from this campaign, partly because of the lack of diversity in the first two states and partly because Obama has never made his race central to his campaign. That’s about to change, as Nevada, with its large Hispanic population, and South Carolina, with its large black population, prepare to vote. Obama has an interest in downplaying his race in both states. There are lingering tensions between the Hispanic and black communities which he doesn’t want to inflame, and some residual skepticism among black voters concerning Obama’s electability among whites. Interestingly, in the final days of the New Hampshire campaign, when defeat looked certain for Clinton, it was Hillary’s aides who started talking privately about racial politics. They argued that on February 5th, when twenty-two states vote, Hillary’s fire wall would be Hispanic voters in the largest states, such as California and New York.

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/21/080121fa_fact_lizza?printable=true

there

Race is woven into the very fabric of America, it is intertwined within the vines of our society.

Right now it seems that the campaign is more Black v White then Man v Woman.