Obama-Romney election: Is race a factor
The most sensitive issue in the Barack Obama-Mitt Romney race may well be ... race.
A new Associated Press poll says that "racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president," and that "a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not."
Those kinds of views "cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some Americans' more favorable views of blacks," AP says.
Of course, many of these same attitudes hovered over the 2008 election, which Obama won easily.
"The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago. ...
"Obama himself has tread cautiously on the subject of race, but many African-Americans have talked openly about perceived antagonism toward them since Obama took office. As evidence, they point to events involving police brutality or cite bumper stickers, cartoons and protest posters that mock the president as a lion or a monkey, or lynch him in effigy.
"'Part of it is growing polarization within American society,' said Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. 'The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a national discussion about race. There's been total silence around issues of race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings.'
"Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. However, Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.
"The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).
"Obama faced a similar situation in 2008, the survey then found."