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Peck, a 50-year-old repairman from Beaver Dam, said the Democratic Illinois senator’s race won’t be a factor in whether he’ll vote for Obama or his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Instead, he’s trying to figure out which candidate is most likely to keep his promises.
But Peck, who is white, said there’s underlying concern among some of his white friends about what an Obama presidency might mean for them.
“With a colored president, they’ll think (government) will lean more toward the colored people, and we’ll be a minority,” Peck said.
Race has been a constant, if sometimes muted, motif in this historic campaign in which Obama, the son of black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, has become the first African-American in line to win a major party’s presidential nomination.
Political experts say Americans are more ready now than ever before for a black
president. A national Gallup poll in December found only 5 percent of the respondents wouldn’t vote for a candidate who is black compared with 54 percent in 1958.
But new data from Wisconsin raise the possibility that the racial attitudes of state voters could play a role in whether Obama wins the state’s 10 electoral votes in November.
Twenty-three percent of 506 likely voters — 91 percent of whom are white — polled in June by the UW-Madison political science department and WisPolitics.com said “the country has gone too far in giving African Americans special legal rights.” Nearly half, 48 percent, said blacks “often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing.” And 16 percent said blacks “have less ambition.”
Sample sizes for all racial groups but whites were too small to gauge opinions of those subgroups.
Getting at race
Charles Franklin, a UW-Madison political scientist who helped conduct the poll, said those results show how race shapes how people view the world and one another. Franklin said the questions served as a substitute for asking respondents directly if they wouldn’t vote for Obama because he is black, a question unlikely to yield accurate responses.
The poll shows other factors — such as party identification, political ideology, education level and whether a person believes the country is headed in the wrong direction — are more important than race in determining whether a voter is likely to choose McCain or Obama, Franklin said. And racial attitudes alone aren’t swaying votes, he said.
But those attitudes suggest that, in combination with other factors, views of Obama’s race could cost him possibly 2 percent of the vote, Franklin said.
In a state like Wisconsin, where recent presidential contests have been won or lost on the margins, that could be significant.
Al Gore, the Democratic former vice president, won Wisconsin by just 5,700 votes in 2000 and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., won the state by 11,400 votes in 2004 — victories of less than 1 percent in each case.
“The big mystery of the year is how much of the vote does (Obama) lose based on race?” Franklin said. “The other question is, how much does his election campaign bring voters around to thinking race isn’t that important for them?”
The polling data
A separate June poll of 1,537 likely Wisconsin voters by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute asked voters directly whether race would be a factor in whether they’d vote for Obama.
Four percent said they would be less likely to vote for him because he’s black — although another 4 percent said Obama’s race made them more likely to vote for him. Ninety-one percent said his race wouldn’t matter. Of white voters surveyed, 5 percent said they would be less likely to vote for Obama because of his race, while 3 percent said they would be more likely.
Nationally, a sharp contrast has emerged in how whites and blacks perceive Obama.
A New York Times/CBS News poll released last week found that 83 percent of black voters in the U.S. had a favorable impression of Obama compared to 31 percent of white voters. Blacks are also far more likely than whites to consider Obama patriotic, to say he cares about the “needs and problems of people like” me, and to say he says what he believes instead of what he thinks people want to hear.
Sixteen percent of the whites surveyed said they think Obama would favor blacks over whites, compared with 4 percent of blacks who believed that.
The issue of race in this year’s campaign is “an undercurrent and a constant presence but it’s not front and center,” said Bill Galston, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution who studies political polarization.
“It emerges into high relief at certain moments, and every emergence of race into this campaign has been a surprise,” he said.
Race could tighten
Though recent polls show Obama with a big lead over McCain in Wisconsin — between 9 and 13 points — Franklin and other experts expect the race to tighten over the summer. And given the outcome of the 2000 and 2004 races, Wisconsin is still seen as a key battleground state.
So what voters think of Obama in Beaver Dam — which is 94 percent white and where Kerry took 50.3 percent of the vote — could be a bellwether for the rest of Wisconsin.
The polls show most people won’t take Obama’s race into account when they go to the polls. More than a dozen potential voters interviewed last week in Beaver Dam said they wouldn’t either, and most said they haven’t heard their friends or neighbors say Obama’s race would be a factor in their vote.
“I think it’s the greatest thing that people are opening up and not letting prejudice get in the way,” said Bob Frankenstein, 72, of Beaver Dam, a retired prison building and grounds superintendent and Korean War veteran who is leaning toward Obama. “I hear a lot more people open to change than ever before.”
His friend, Bill Hollihan, 78, an Army veteran, said he was surprised he hasn’t heard any comments about Obama’s race.
“I’m amazed because I always thought Beaver Dam was more of a conservative place,” said Hollihan, who is leaning toward supporting McCain.
But others said Obama’s race is among the factors being considered by their friends, neighbors and acquaintances.
“I’ve heard some comments (about Obama’s race) but they’ve been in the minority,” said Aaron Onsrud, 32, a Beaver Dam alderman who has been talking to voters as he campaigns for the 39th Assembly district seat. “There will be some people that race will affect, but on the whole people are willing to see past that.”
Mark Pitsch is a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.
