… people don’t want to admit to pollsters that they aren’t voting for the black candidate?
Instapundit frames it so it sounds like Susan Estrich is saying that Democrats are racist and we should assume that in a general election everyone else is even *more* racist. I was going to dispute that baseless assumption. (That Democrats are less racist than other people.)
But I’m not sure what she thinks. I read the column and I’m not sure what she thinks. The “racism” she describes is simply that people, when asked, are likely to lie and say they’re planning to vote for the black guy. But surely it’s not *required* to vote for the black candidate! Not wanting to be labeled a racist is far from the same thing as being one. Though it may well return false positives when people are polled.
But she does seem to be implying that racism is an issue with Democrats and will be even more of an issue in the general election… it just doesn’t make sense with the rest of what she said.
Bingo.
This strikes me as a much more likely reason for people lying (assuming that they are) than racism. That doesn’t mean that some people refuse to vote for Obama because they are racists, some of whom may hide they’re bigotry by claiming to vote for him when they fully intend not to. But it seems to me that with so many accusations of racism being thrown around, there are probably a good number of people who simply want to avoid the epithet so they lie about their choice, even though they really aren’t racist.
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think the Fox News piece actually gave us the specific question the exit polling asks folks. If it is as simple as “who did you vote for,” I don’t understand why anyone would think they would be construed as racist for not saying Obama.
And if California, Nevada and Arizona have shown us anything, its not white voters that are avoiding his campaign, but the Mexican American and Latino populations. I would really love to see exit polls for that specific group of Democratic voters, and see what they claimed next to the actual vote.