{"id":47524,"date":"2012-05-25T11:30:15","date_gmt":"2012-05-25T16:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=47524"},"modified":"2012-05-24T15:02:52","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T20:02:52","slug":"race-and-politics-in-appalachia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/05\/25\/race-and-politics-in-appalachia\/","title":{"rendered":"Race and Politics in Appalachia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.\u00a0 The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like \u201cuncommitted\u201d (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).<\/p>\n

Could it be that there\u2019s racism at work in Appalachia?\u00a0 Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies?<\/p>\n

The 2008 Presidential election — Obama v. McCain — offers some hints.\u00a0 For those with short memories, the Bush legacy — an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe — may have hurt the GOP.\u00a0 In that election, the country went Democratic.\u00a0 The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.\u00a0 But not everywhere.\u00a0 The Times<\/em> provides\u00a0this map<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.\u00a0 As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here<\/a>), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is…<\/p>\n

…almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:<\/p>\n

\n
One man\u2019s racial differences is another man\u2019s cultural differences.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Right.\u00a0 The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.\u00a0 But David Weigel, in\u00a0Slate<\/a>, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries \u2013 Obama versus Hillary Clinton.\u00a0 A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.\u00a0 Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.\u00a0 Besides, there wasn\u2019t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

Cilizza is right that we can\u2019t read voters\u2019 minds.\u00a0 But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.\u00a0 The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like \u201cuncommitted\u201d (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia). Could it be that there\u2019s racism at work in Appalachia?\u00a0 Or is the anti-Obama vote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3920,85,238,8121,283,285,1760,1757],"class_list":["post-47524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-election-2008","tag-election-2012","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47524"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47528,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47524\/revisions\/47528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}