Nole Irritare Leones links to an article citing a Newsweek poll about the chances of electing a female or black President. Respondents overwhelmingly said that they, themselves, would vote for someone other than ‘standard white male guy’, but doubted that the rest of the electorate would. It’s a bit like the poll results showing that most drivers rate themselves above average.
I doubt that the poll tracks anything like the way actual voters would actually behave. For one thing, it probably suffers from response bias; few people are likely to tell a pollster something they feel makes them look like a sexist or a bigot. Worse, though, is that it assumes an answer to an abstract question can be applied to actual candidates. Asking whether a voter would reject a candidate out-of-hand purely because of their sex, or race, doesn’t tell us much about what standards that voter applies to female or minority candidates. Theoretically willing to vote for some female candidate says nothing about how a person will judge an actual female candidate, or whether they will apply biased and/or disproportionately high standards and scrutiny to that candidate.
The shorter, cynical version is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would have been candidates by now if they were white guys.
mythago
One Response to “Above-Average Voters”
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I remember thinking in 1992 that Hilary was by far the the more competent Clinton. Unfortunately, I’m afraid she’s since jumped the shark, and while I’ll certainly vote for her if she gets my party’s nomination, I’ll almost certainly be voting for somebody else in the primary. Maybe Obama, you never know.
K