Is this going to be Rodney King or OJ again?
I was going through some nytimes opinion pages and I stumbled on this page again. I started thinking about, I understand that some people are like this but I wonder how many people are like that. Yea, I know it’s a touchy subject, but I was curious what the developer community thought about the subject. Anyone?
Tags: politics
September 6th, 2008 at 9:46 am
I think there are people that won’t vote for Obama because he’s black, but I think those people are few and far between.
A week ago, the polling numbers showed Obama ahead. The polls from the last couple of days show that McCain has come up to a tie with Obama. So what changed? Sarah Palin. It’s not that she has attracted that much more support for McCain, but rather it’s because of the Obama campaign’s reaction to her.
I watched a news program yesterday that had two pollster guests, Scott Rasmussen of RasMussen Reports, and the head of Gallup Polling. Both of them agreed that the main cause for McCains recent surge in the polls is the vicious personal attacks against Palin. They have been questioning her credentials, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But they’ve also been relentlessly attacking her personally, for her family problems and her career choices that take her away from her family. I read a column from a Democratic strategist who was pissed off because of these sexist attacks against Palin. The columnist said, “Would anybody ever question a man if his job takes him away from his family? No. Then why is it Ok to question a woman for this?”
I think these relentless vicious personal attacks against Palin for a solid week have really hurt Obama.
September 6th, 2008 at 10:57 am
There are huge problems with polling. The data is usually far from accurate because the technique and its results are like swiss-cheese. And asking this particular set of questions about willingness to vote for a candidate of a different race is even more susceptible to a lot of those problems. It’s politically incorrect to admit to being racist in most major cities (though there are still many small-town cultures where racism is tacitly expected amongst the community).
There’s a good chance that there are more racists than there are people who admit to racism when polled. So the actual number is probably higher than 5%. But you can’t accept the 19% either, not just because it’s a question about the person’s neighbors, but because there are some well known cognitive studies that show the answers to those kinds of questions are typically much higher than the reality. That particular phenomenon is known as the “availability heuristic”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
Though there are several other related cognitive biases that might also influence those results.
Neglect of Probability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglect_of_probability
Base Rate Falacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
Fundamental Attribution Error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
If you wanted to get a reasonably accurate assessment of the percentage of voters who are unwilling to vote for a member of another race, you would need to perform a regression analysis of past voting. You can’t get data that will indicate which individuals voted for which candidate, because that’s protected by the privacy of the ballot box. However you can get demographic information that indicates the groupings of people who showed up to vote, i.e. turnout at the voting center was XX% white, XX% black, etc.
You would then cross-reference those demographics with the number of votes for each candidate and that would give you an indication of cross-polination or “non-homogenous” voting in that area. Then do that across a wide variety of local elections throughout the country and thats where you find your indication of the effects of racist sentiments in voting.
Without having accurate statistics like that, I would guess that it’s probably somewhere between 10% and 15% because the 5% of people who admitted is probably low, and the 19% they gave is probably high because of the effects of “availability” on their response, guessing high on the number of their neighbors that share their opinions on the subject.
September 6th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I live in North Florida. I can tell you first hand that there are MANY people who would not vote for Obama because he is black. You can’t drive to the nearest CompUSA without seeing a few confederate flags along the way.
As for Jake’s comment:
“Would anybody ever question a man if his job takes him away from his family? No. Then why is it Ok to question a woman for this?”
One month before Joe Biden was sworn in for his first term in office, his wife and newborn baby were killed in a car crash. His two other children were also in the car, but survived. Many people, and the news media questioned whether he should give up his newly elected seat… which was his initial inclination.
So in answer to your question Jake… yes, people would question a man about a job taking him away from his children.
September 6th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Jake, I don’t think it was the Obama campaign making the comments unless it was on when I wasn’t watching. I think it was a lame question to ask that, but I don’t think it came for the campaign. About the daughter though, that was brought on by themselves. They put their kids out in the public eye and continue to do so. Personally, I think it’s ridiculous to whine about it now after they attacked Hillary Clinton with the same ferocity as folks are attacking Palin. I still wonder when people are going to start talking about the many things wrong with Palin and her views. She is a HUGE hypocrite!
September 8th, 2008 at 7:06 am
If you want to truly see racism when it comes to voting, take a poll on how many black people will vote for Obama just because he’s black, and how many refuse to vote for McCain just because he’s white. You’ll never get a true count, but if everyone were to honestly answer the poll the numbers would be staggering.
September 8th, 2008 at 7:27 am
I am sure there are plenty of blacks that are voting because he is black. The interesting thing was how most blacks were in favor of Clinton for a while during the primaries. The truth of the matter is, blacks vote democrat more so than republican…especially since the republicans changed their platform.
September 9th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Just imagine how many people won’t vote for McCain because of age discrimination. There is a lot of unfairness in life that that can’t be eliminated, even by the thought police at the NYT.