For Obama, Demographics May Be Key to the White House

This week’s West Virginia primary, in which Hillary Clinton crushed Barack Obama, raised some doubt that Obama could do well in the general election. Pundits wondered how Obama could possibly connect with the white, working-class voters who rejected him so soundly at the polls on Tuesday, and their comments were accompanied by a litany of disheartening quotes from West Virginia Democrats who said they wouldn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s African-American, because he’s elitist, or—demonstrating that some rumors just don’t die—because he’s Muslim.

In a lecture in New York last Thursday evening, University of Chicago political scientist John Mark Hansen laid out in sharp numbers the argument that Obama’s race doesn’t present an enormous obstacle, after all. (Full disclosure: I worked for Hansen as a research assistant when I was in college.)

Successive generations are more liberal in their views toward minorities, Hansen said, and baby boomers, who are substantially more liberal on race than their parents, have reached the age bracket of maximum voter participation, making their attitudes particularly influential at the polls.

Studies conducted in the 1960s and 70s found sharp generational contrasts in racial attitudes. For instance, about 55% of whites born in 1943 or later reported that they had at least some black friends. The corresponding figures for those born between 1927 and 1942, and for those born between 1911 and 1926: 50% and 40%, respectively. The same studies found similar differences between cohorts in favoring or opposing desegregation.

Meanwhile, Americans have generally become more liberal on race regardless of generation, noted Hansen, possibly because Americans have had greater exposure to African-Americans in prestigious positions—as, for example, through Congress, which had 10 black members in 1975, and 42 in 2005.

The result: Americans are more willing than ever to vote for a black presidential candidate. A 1958 Gallup poll found that just over 40% of Americans would be willing to vote for a qualified black presidential candidate. That percentage broke the 70% mark in the late 1960s; today, about 95% of Americans tell pollsters that they would vote for a qualified black presidential candidate.

Americans also seem to be lying less when asked about supporting black candidates, which suggests that action has caught up to words when it comes to race. For decades, pollsters have observed what they’ve called the “Bradley effect,” a tendency for black candidates to do better in pre-election surveys than they do when voters go to the booths. The effect, named for former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, is attributed to the fact that people don’t want to sound bigoted to pollsters, even though they may vote against black candidates in the privacy of the voting booth. Tom Bradley lost his 1982 bid for governor of California even though polls forecast that he would win handily; similar gaps between poll numbers and votes turned up in big bids by such African-American candidates as Harold Washington, David Dinkins, L. Douglas Wilder, and Carol Moseley Braun.

That effect has diminished recently, though, said Hansen, and he pointed out that Lynn Swann of Pennsylvania and Harold Ford, Jr., of Tennessee both actually received more support from voters in their 2006 runs than polls had forecast. There is some evidence that Barack Obama tends to enjoy a reverse Bradley effect, as well; his January performance in Iowa, for instance, came in almost seven percentage points above the figure forecast by polls.

The generational effects continue into the cohort that has just reached voting age. Obama is particularly popular with college students, whose support may obviate one of the Clinton campaign’s biggest knocks against him: that Obama can’t connect with white, blue-collar voters.

Earlier, over lunch downtown, Hansen had explained why the Clinton camp’s claim might not be valid. Clinton supporters—labor unionists, older voters, blue-collar workers—“are core Democratic voters that have a stronger likelihood of voting Democratic,” said Hansen. “They have a better chance of coming home in the fall when the choice is, ‘do I vote Republican.’” Obama’s supporters, who trend younger and more independent, are the ones who need special courting by the Democratic Party. Said Hansen: “Those are voters who don’t have the same depth of loyalty to the Democratic Party as the Clinton voters do.”

--Jon Bruner