Explain it away all you want, but the basic fact is this – there’s a more than a little bit of racism working its way around South Carolina, and that helped buttress Sen. McCain’s latest polling numbers in the Palmetto State.
Bucking the trend showing a 4-6 point race, a Research 2000/Daily Kos poll shows McCain up on Obama 53-40 (cue Fogle furiously masturbating). Shockingly, 78 percent of all white voters favor McCain. That’s seven points less than Kerry got, for chrissakes. And he was French.
This is how it is in South Carolina. It’s racial, straight-up. You’ve got the whites in the Republican Party, blacks in the Democratic Party, and about 10-15 percent of whites and 5-10 percent of blacks who buck the trend.
How fucked up is it? A Democrat who pulls 30 percent of the white vote will win, and that doesn’t happen all that often. So, now you’ve got two ethnicities battling it out at the ballot box. Really – where else in the country (beside Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, et. al.) would you find 80 percent of whites and 90 percent of blacks on opposite sides of a campaign?
Also, and let’s face it, it’s still hard for a black candidate to win statewide, here and elsewhere in the old Confederacy. Even in Virginia, which elected Doug Wilder the first black governor back in ‘89, there are issues. The same year (2001) that saw Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine win governor and lieutenant governor, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, a black state senator, lost 2-to-1.
It does suck, just a little, to be reminded again that this is the way things work around here.
SC-Pres: Not so good for Obama [DailyKos]
For more on the topic:
Tucker Eskew on S.C.’s racist ‘rubes’
Race in South Carolina on CNN
The fucking Nazis
A West Columbia high school teacher
The Southern Avenger’s take
And, the cherry on top – the Redneck Shop
Unfortunately you have some of the same sentiment all over this nation…it is represented in corners of the Democratic party as well…Obama is a Harvard educated scholar just imagine how people look at poor and middle class folks of color… There are a lot of good upstanding and informed people when it comes to reaching across the divide, but we see the problem with Baracks candidacy whether he’ll win or if he’s qualified is a whole separate issue… http://www.enewsreference.com
The psycho from BC HS spelled Columbia wrong (Collumbia) on one of his Internet posts… brilliant.