One of the most notable -- yet unremarked-on -- lessons of this year's Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won't vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?
As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. "It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates," the committee's report concluded -- a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.
The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in "majority-minority" districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.
So it's not surprising that, as the 2008 presidential race got underway, many observers -- white and African American alike -- thought Obama's chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. Robert Ford, a black state senator in South Carolina, for instance, told a Time magazine reporter in January 2007 that "Obama would need 43% of the white vote in some states to win, and that's humanly impossible." Southern blacks "don't believe this country is ready to vote for a black president," he added. Jesse Jackson argued that "a white female has an advantage over a black male." And after the first three contests, political scientist Philip Klinkner was ready to say that there was a "ceiling" on white support for Obama of about 35%.
Polling data suggested otherwise. In 2003, for instance, only 7% of Americans said they were unwilling to vote for a "qualified African American candidate," according to a Gallup Organization survey. But many analysts refused to believe such polls, preferring to note racism's long history in American politics or to suggest that white voters were not telling the truth to pollsters.
After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he's run in as well.
