Will white Democratic racism cost Barack Obama an election he really should win? For months, the highest level of Obama political advisers have publicly cast doubt on the scenario. Their thinking assumes that Obama's turnout demography will compensate for older white Democrats who are uncomfortable with Obama's race, and that white women under 50 living outside cities -- the marginal voters in this election -- while not being entirely immune from racial conditioning and subconscious associations -- are nonetheless swayable by many other Obama attributes.The Obama campaign is no monolith when it comes to this question. Some advisers, are worried. And there is anecdotal evidence that the campaign's microtargeting -- read about it here -- is envisioned and implemented with one major aim being the rendering of Barack Obama as safe and unthreatening.
Andrew Sullivan has argued that race is but one of several uncomfortable traits that Obama possesses, traits that widen an already existing generational fissure, pit young against old, and heighten, for many, a sense of cultural insecurity about a man whose lifestory is American -- 21st century American, just not the American story they are used to. The slogan of Andrew's blog is that "To See."
The AP story has provoked a furious counterreaction from those who want to believe that America is ready to elect a black president. Some of the points are valid, although they focus on the application of the argument and not the science.
For one, the universe studied by Stanford is larger than the universe of those who vote, but there tends to be a correlation in attitudes between voters and non-voters. Another objection is that tests like the implicit association test -- and the AP used something called the affect misattribution procedure -- are flawed. Try the implicit association test (again, not precisely what the AP used) yourself. It has withstood most scholarly skepticism, at least with its thin claims, which is that there are often unconscious associations between concepts and attributes, and those associations often form a pattern, even if one cannot prove that the pattern is independent of experience, and even if one cannot prove that internal perception matters more in terms of race relations than conscious, explicit judgments. (See more here and here.) A scary finding: even African Americans are not immune to the effect.
"We would give voters a list of organizations, things, places and people and ask them if they were "good for America" or "Bad for America"? Is the Red Cross good for America or bad for America? Is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People good for America or bad for America. At the end of a battery of 32 such groups, places, people or things we were able to spot a group of about 40% of white democrats who rated at least one African-American group as bad for America and a smaller group of roughly 15% of white democrats who rate the majority of black groups as bad for America," he says in an e-mail. Still, he says, "This was 26 years ago and attitudes have changed big time since then."
The Bradley effect turned out to be a 10 point problem for Bradley; surely it is less today, but at the same time, no one would argue, or should argue, or can argue that racial attitudes have completely metamorphosed among enough Americans to as to render the effect in the first presidential election involving a black candidate moot. Or can they?
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