Forthcoming Study: White Voters and Black Candidates

An item by Washington Post columnist Richard Morin (who I didn't know before running across a link in Slate's Today's Papers) may have implications for Ohio’s gubernatorial race. It concerns a forthcoming paper by Ebonya Washington at Yale. According to Morin:

In fact, 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 independents are similarly inclined to vote for the white Democrat when there's a black Republican running, according to her study of congressional and gubernatorial voting patterns between 1982 and 2000, including five Senate races in which the Republican nominee was black.

Before you don your Mantle of Moral Superiority, White Democrat Person, note also:

Democrats also desert their party when its candidate is black, Washington found.
In House races, white Democrats are 38 percentage points less likely to vote
Democratic if their candidate is black.

Blogging about race and politics can be dicey. It’s not Give an Award for the Blackest Sorority Member dicey, but dicey nonetheless.

Regardless, let me raise a few questions. This blurb of a column – actually one-third of a column – doesn’t say whether the data are disaggregated by region. In English – is the effect more pronounced in the South? I would wonder especially with regard to the Democrat effect. There are, reportedly, still clutches on Dixiecrats who didn't jump ship in the 80s. If the effect is sharper in the South, it may have sterner implications for J. Ken Blackwell than, say Barbara Sykes. J.Ken’s base in Southern Ohio which has a fair amount of, well, southiness to it. Southern Ohio is basically an Appalachian state.

Sykes’ base is in northern, especially Northeastern Ohio. We have our southernish charm here – that canard about Akron being the capital of West Virginia? Not so far off. But the white Democrats tend more toward the bland, Midwestern, farmer-descendent variety like yours truly.

A second question I would have – and one that potentially gets White America off the hook a little – is whether the study in some why controlled for the ideology of the candidate. As I was thinking about this article it occurred to me that African American candidates of either party tend to run on the far edges of their respective wings. I’ve been racking my brain, but Barak Obama and Colin Powell are the only Black national political figures who can actually reach across the aisle and shake hands. Everyone else seems on one extreme or another.

It would make sense that moderates Whites might cross party lines in favor of a more moderate candidate on the other side than the extremist their party nominated. That’s certainly what those Liberals who want the wingnuts to nominate Blackwell are hoping for.

It’s supremely depressing to think that this still happens. Not that I thought racism had gone away. But I thought that, because overt expressions of it now earn social opprobrium, people are less likely to engage in consciously racist acts. In fact, I had shared with Subodh Chandra my theory of The Good Minority – that a fair number of white people who harbor consciously racist thoughts feel sufficiently guilty that they search for Good Minorities to support, so that their dislike of other people of color becomes in their minds all about how those people are acting and not how they are.

My point to Subodh was that his ethnicity may actually be an asset because Indians are the very definition of a Good Minority. Ken Blackwell, I thought, benefits from a Good Minority effect. This research casts that theory into question – not the first time I had a perfectly good theory run aground on the shoals of actual data. And of course we need to see more details about the study to be able to talk seriously about what it means.

In the meantime, it is, as I said, depressing to think that this still happens. More depressing still to think that, come November, I may be rooting for it to happen.