Explaining the Defections (http://barticles.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/barticles/comments/even_more_obvious/)
Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch responds to our item yesterday(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120663444749668867.html) on why supporters of Hillary Clinton are considerably more likely to vote for John McCain over Barack Obama than Obama supporters are to defect if Mrs. Clinton gets the nod:
As Yale's Ebonya Washington found out in a study a couple of years ago, Democrats are considerably more likely to bolt their party to avoid voting for a black candidate than Republicans are. As Washington Post columnist Richard Morin (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301776.html) summarized her findings in 2006, "White Republicans nationally are 25 percentage points more likely on average to vote for the Democratic senatorial candidate when the GOP hopeful is black. . . . White Democrats are 38 percentage points less likely to vote Democratic if their candidate is black."
Democrats who harbor racial animus obviously have less reason to bolt the party if Clinton wins the nomination. That explanation would seem best suited to pass the Occam's Razor test. Don't sit on a hot stove waiting for the Democratic cheering section to consider that possibility, though.
While Hinkle's conclusion is certainly tempting, Morin's column, published in April 2006, illustrates the problem with drawing conclusions based on Washington's study (which is available here(http://www.econ.yale.edu/ddp/ddp00/ddp0016.pdf)). Morin begins as follows:
Bad news for Michael S. Steele, the leading Maryland Republican candidate for Senate in November: The scuttling noise he hears on Election Day could be the sound of tens of thousands of white Republicans crossing over to vote for the Democrat.
Steele in fact got the nomination, but Morin's prediction was wrong. According to exit polls, only 6% of Republicans voted for his opponent, Ben Cardin. Steele did twice as well among Democrats as Cardin did among Republicans, getting 12% of their vote. Cardin won nonetheless, because Maryland is a heavily Democratic state and he outpolled Steele among independents.
Contrast this with another Senate campaign with a black Republican nominee--in Illinois in 2004. Exit polls there show that 40% of Republicans deserted their party to vote for Alan Keyes's Democratic opponent, a young up-and-comer called Barack Obama. Obama also outpolled Keyes among Democrats, 94% to 5%.
Did Republicans abandon Keyes because he was black, or because he was not a serious candidate? What would we do without rhetorical questions?
A Pew Research Center poll (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/779/obama-weathers-the-wright-storm-clinton-faces-credibility-problem) does find some evidence of retrograde racial views among the Democratic electorate:
White Democrats who hold unfavorable views of Obama are much more likely than those who have favorable opinions of him to say that equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far; they also are more likely to disapprove of interracial dating.
To be specific, 28% of white Democrats with an unfavorable view of Obama disapprove of interracial dating, as do 8% of those with a favorable view of him. On the question of whether "equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far," the figures are 45% and 19% respectively, though in our view the question is so vague as to be nearly meaningless. Also, we can't for the life of us find Obama's favorable/unfavorable numbers among white Democrats in the Pew report, so there's no way of knowing how these pairs of figures compare.
Also, unlike the Gallup poll we noted yesterday, Pew finds no significant difference between Obama's supporters and Mrs. Clinton's as to their stated propensity to defect and support McCain.
Gallup(http://www.gallup.com/poll/105742/Democratic-Groups-Most-Risk-Deserting.aspx) has some follow-up numbers, which show that among Clinton supporters, Democrat-leaning independents and conservative Democrats are the most likely to defect to McCain if Obama is the nominee, while blacks and liberal Democrats are the least likely to defect. But the same groups are also at the top and bottom of the list of Obama supporters who are most likely to defect if Mrs. Clinton is the nominee. So this would seem to tell us something about which Democrats are most loyal generally, rather than about supporters of one candidate or the other.
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