Obama struggle to attract white voters continues

Barack Obama faltered in the Pennsylvania primary largely because not enough blue-collar white Democratic voters supported him. But this problem is nothing new for the Democratic front-runner, whose impressive overall success in the long nomination battle has been accompanied all year by a nagging difficulty in consistently attracting white votes.

The question that could be on the minds of the party insiders who, as so-called superdelegates, may decide the nomination in Denver is whether Obama’s weakness with white voters could endure and spell trouble in November if he is the nominee.

White voters’ reluctance to support the first black frontrunner in the history of presidential politics predates Obama’s controversial remarks about “bitter” small-town voters clinging to religion and guns. It even was evident before the mid-March firestorm over the racial rhetoric of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Including Pennsylvania, 31 states have now held Democratic primaries or caucuses where exit polls provide a racial breakdown of support.

In 24 of those states, Hillary Rodham Clinton has won a majority of white voters. Obama carried the majority of white support in only seven.

In Pennsylvania, 63 percent of white voters backed Clinton, to 37 percent for Obama.

“He’s obviously plateaued among white voters,” said Bethany Albertson, a political science professor at the University of Washington who has studied racial voting patterns in the campaign. “It may be that the more realistic an Obama candidacy looks, the more voters are stopping and thinking about electability, implicitly hearing the message that a black candidate can’t win.”

Post-racial candidate

Asked Wednesday about Obama’s difficulty attracting white votes, campaign spokesman Bill Burton didn’t directly address the issue. “There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton came into this campaign with certain formidable advantages with some voters,” he wrote in an e-mail, noting that Obama “has won more states, more votes and more delegates than her.”

Ever since he launched his campaign, Obama has sought to portray himself as a “post-racial” candidate, and racial issues were nowhere near the heart of his message and policy agenda, at least not until the controversy began over the remarks of his former pastor.

To be sure, exit polls could just as easily be interpreted as showing Clinton losing the black Democratic vote heavily to Obama. She got just 10 percent of black votes Tuesday, comparable to her showing in many contests.

But few doubt that in November black voters will overwhelmingly support any Democratic nominee.

How white general election voters might respond to a black nominee is less certain, particularly in light of white Democrats’ tepid response to Obama so far.

A poll conducted by the Associated Press earlier this month showed that 8 percent of whites said they would be uncomfortable voting for a black presidential candidate.

A separate poll published last month by the Pew Center for the People and the Press dissected Obama’s strengths and weaknesses among the nation’s white voters.

It concluded that while Obama’s personal image is more favorable than Clinton’s among Democrats, “certain social beliefs and attitudes among older, white, working-class Democratic voters are associated with his lower levels of support among this group.”

The poll found that white voters who say equal rights for minorities have been pushed too far are twice as likely as those who disagree to have an unfavorable view of Obama; similarly, those who disapprove of interracial dating are nearly four times as likely to have an unfavorable view of Obama.

The South a factor

Back in February, during Obama’s 11-state victory streak, he often attracted support from 40 percent or more of white voters who described themselves as Democrats. He did even better among whites who described themselves as political independents. His high-water mark occurred Feb. 19 in Wisconsin, where he won 54 percent of the overall white vote.

But starting in Ohio and Texas on March 4, Obama’s support among whites slipped below 40 percent and reached a low of 23 percent on March 11 in Mississippi.

James Gibson, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said Obama’s apparent weakness among white voters can be traced to both the racial politics of the South and to Republicans who have crossed over to vote in Democratic primaries.

“When you look at the Southern states, he’s not getting white votes there,’’ Gibson said.

In fact, a recent analysis by the Chicago Tribune showed that in the 10 former Confederate states that have voted, Obama has trailed Clinton among white voters by an average of 29 percentage points. He won a majority of the white vote in one of the 10, but that was Virginia, where the heavily populated environs of Washington, D.C., alter the cultural mix.

Even in a Midwestern state like Ohio, expected to be a decisive battleground in November, Clinton, while winning everywhere outside the large metro areas, racked up her biggest majorities — often above 70 percent of the vote — in southern and eastern counties near the state’s borders with Kentucky and West Virginia.

Republicans back Clinton

Meanwhile, in Democratic primaries that allowed Republicans and independents to vote, Republicans have disproportionately backed Clinton. “Obviously, white Republicans haven’t been voting for Obama, so that’s suppressing his totals among whites,” Gibson said.

Steve Smith, a colleague of Gibson’s at Washington University, said it makes sense that the Obama-Clinton contest has polarized voters by race and gender. “In a race where the candidates’ policy differences are minuscule, it creates the exact circumstance where [voters’] race and gender biases trip up both candidates,” he said.

But those differences could well fade away in November, Smith said: “When one of them is running against a Republican, the party [identification] is going to trump race or sex for Democratic voters.”

Bob von Sternberg • 612-673-7184