After Kentucky: What Obama’s Loss Means

As a result of Tuesday’s Democratic primaries in Oregon and Kentucky, Barack Obama now has enough pledged delegates to claim, as he did in Iowa, that he is “within reach” of the Democratic party’s presidential nomination.

But Clinton’s better than two-to-one route of Obama in Kentucky leaves his campaign with plenty to worry about. Although in Oregon Obama scored his first victory among white voters since Vermont, his lopsided loss in Kentucky reflected the kind of difficulty he has had in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Clinton won the support of white voters in Kentucky by a 49 percent margin, even capturing white voters under thirty by 34 point margin

But what is most disturbing for Obama, as Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz recently argued in a Washington Post essay, are figures from the 2004 American National Election Study that show how whites across the country view the causes of black poverty. In the American National Election Study, which was conducted by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, white voters were asked whether they agreed with the statement that “blacks should try harder to succeed.” The answers white voters gave are potentially devastating for the Obama campaign: 71 percent of whites with no college education believe that blacks should try harder to succeed, and 43 percent of whites with a college education agree. To make matters worse for Obama, 49 percent of all white voters surveyed in the study disagreed with the statement that “history makes it more difficult for black to succeed.”

This November, with John McCain as his opponent, Barack Obama may get more white votes than polls now indicate. The economy seems unlikely to improve dramatically in the coming months, and there is a good chance that white, working-class voters will in the end vote their self-interest, even if it means reluctantly casting their ballots for a black presidential candidate.

The danger for Obama is that if John McCain can turn the 2008 election into a debate over biography, he will be in a position to capture the same white workers who once supported Ronald Reagan. As Abramowitz emphasizes, what the American National Election Study shows is that whites who believe blacks need to do more to end black poverty find it easy to vote for a white candidate, no matter who he or she is, because they don’t feel guilty about what has become socially taboo—overt racial prejudice.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower. Photo: Obama at American University (Will White / Creative Commons).