South Carolina: Results & Race

by Ali-Asad

"Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact".
Lyndon B. Johnson

In an op-ed piece, Dick Morris posited an interesting theory; he speculates that the Clinton campaign intentionally brought race into the democratic primary race in order to provoke a white backlash against Obama. This strategy involves making Obama a racial candidate, and letting him win South Carolina in order to allow Hillary to sweep up the votes of all those white voters who fear an actual black candidate. How does this theory hold up against the results of the South Carolina (SC) primary results? (Obama won taking 55% with Hillary at 27% and Edwards at 19%). The first part of Morris’s strategy would involve reducing expectations for Hillary in SC in order blunt any potential momentum Obama could receive from a victory in the last primary before Super Tuesday, Feb 5th.

The Expectation Game

In numerous press releases the Clinton campaign claimed to be competing hard in SC. But the press pays much more attention to where the candidate actually spends their time campaigning, and Hilary spent a lot more time in Feb. 5th states such as California and New York than first-in-the-south SC – Hillary did not even stay in SC on election night after her loss to give a concession speech; she flew straight to Tennessee which is another state voting on Feb. 5th. Another vital cog in the media expectations game is the polls which showed Obama holding a healthy 10-15% lead over Hillary. After the failure of the polls in New Hampshire (where not one poll predicted the Hillary victory), the media relied much less upon the SC polls in making their judgments. But they didn’t have to. The media had already established that Obama had secured overwhelming support in the black community and so would definitely win SC. Hillary’s expectation strategy appears to have worked except for one small tiny issue – the actual result. Obama beat Hilary by more than 25%. From pundit expectations to poll driven predictions, this margin is outstanding. Obama well and truly trounced Clinton with the Yahoo! front page calling it a “rout”. This point is crucial because how the media spins Obama’s victory here will determine whether he has any momentum (ie press coverage and poll bumps) going into Tsunami ‘Feb 5th’ Tuesday. And Obama’s big margin of victory will give him that boost. But this victory does not discredit Morris’s theory; race could still be a huge factor in the race.

Racing against Race

Below are the results of an exit poll conducted in SC among those who voted. In total, around 2000 people were polled giving the results a margin of error of 2.25% (see Understanding Margin of Error).



Obama is doing well among blacks. There is no doubt about that. But among white his support appears to be fading. Is this a national trend? I think not? Obama lost support among white voters in Nevada and South Carolina. From these two states, we can identify two reasons Obama is losing support. Firstly, in Nevada, Hispanics are loath to support a black candidate especially when they are competing to become America’s most influential minority. Hispanics in Nevada supported Hillary heavily. Secondly, Morris’s argument assumes that when white voters realize Obama is truly black they will run to Hillary – i.e. white people will never vote a black man into the presidency. Iowa and New Hampshire voters disprove this theory. The (mostly white) voters of these two states did not concern themselves with the race issue. Then why is Obama losing support among whites? Remember, the southern states have not yet been able to come to terms with the past in terms of slavery, and so race still lingers as an issue. Apart from the south, I see no reason for Obama to start hemorrhaging white votes. But he is still fighting a 2 front war – Hispanics don’t want to vote for him and they make up a sizable population in many important Feb. 5th states, and whites still need to be convinced that Obama is an all-inclusive candidate. We’ll have some more answers come Feb 5th, and hopefully we won’t let the media spoon feed them all to us.

And that's jus' the tip.

References

How Clinton will win the nomination by losing South Carolina by Dick Morris

Primary Results for South Carolina – CNN Election Center