Obama, Mississipi and race politics
8:57 am - March 12th 2008
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Barack Obama won the state of Mississipi last night as expected, though by a big margin: 61% to 37%. As many news organisations including the New York Times point out: “The polls found that roughly 90 percent of black voters supported Mr. Obama, but only a third of white voters did.”
The implication may be that Obama can’t win white votes. But clearly that’s not true since he won states like Iowa, Kansas and Vermont that have a negligible black population. It seems more the case that in racially diverse states Obama splits the vote, whereas in largely homogenous states white voters have no problem supporting him. Why might this be the case?
Is it like white flight in a residential area where one or two black/brown neighbours are ok, but as soon as the percentage gets high enough, white people start moving out in droves? Or is it the case that in racially mixed states, whites know that blacks will support him so they take HRC’s side? Or is it that in racially diverse states, whites have a less benign view of blacks generally and that affects their voting behaviour? Not much research seems to have been done into this.
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Sunny Hundal is editor of LC. Also: on Twitter, at Pickled Politics and Guardian CIF.
· Other posts by Sunny Hundal
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Foreign affairs ,Race relations ,United States
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Reader comments
To a large extent its a function of American political history as much as anything else – we are talking Mississippi here, which is about as ‘Dixie’ as it gets.
For historical reasons, what could be called the traditionalist Confederate vote goes to the Democratic Party for the simple reason that the Republic Party in still held to synonymous with the Union side of the Civil War.
There are still many white voters across the ‘Old South’ – the eleven states which seceded from the Union in 1860-61 who, right-wing as they might appear to us, would never vote for a Republican candidate because Lincoln was a Republican and the Republican Party is still seen to be the ‘Yankee’ Party.
As you might well imagine, these are also voters who are unlikely, in the extreme, to vote for a Black democratic candidate, so one of the things to watch very carefully across the 11 ‘Confederate’ Southern states, if Obama heads up the Democratic ticket ,will be the extent to which the ‘Old South’ vote refuses to turn out for either candidate.
A good question might be why 91% of blacks voting went for Obama even in a Democratic race.
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