How would certain southern states vote in this scenario ?
Do you think that MS or AL for example would vote for Obama because he's the "whiter" of the 2 main candidates ?
I'd like to see some recent polling on Alabama and Mississippi -- especially in the wake of the tornado outbreak. Unlike the response of the previous President to Hurricane Katrina, the current President's response is no travesty.
Mississippi politics are machine politics with race-based local machines. Those machines are infamous for corruption, and the black pols are no better than the white pols. But white voters are more tolerant of their own crooks than they are of someone else's crooks. That may be hypocrisy, but that is to be found in all groups about their "own kind". The Presidential election of 2008 broke closely along racial lines, with white Mississippians likely expecting Barack Obama to be another corrupt machine pol out of Chicago instead of out of some nearby hick town in Mississippi.
If white Mississippians voted like white people in Kentucky or West Virginia (both of which have very small black populations and which Barack Obama lost decisively with roughly 60-40 splits among white people), then he would have won the state. Alabama is almost as blatant. If the perception of Barack Obama changes for the better -- as in "Sure, he's a black man, but he's not
that sort of black man", meaning that he is a competent and honest politician unlike the machine hacks who get convicted for abuse of power -- then he just might win one or two of those two states. This is more likely if Republicans in those two states pay little attention to the Presidential election.
That's just wild speculation so far.
Poll
