My favorite Alabama referendum

[Flake]

Bigoted trolling.

You mean the people who voted against the referendum or the op?

[Flake]

The nation as a whole didn't have majority support for interracial marriage tell the late 90s, so AL wasn't all that far behind everyone else.


http://www.gallup.com/poll/149390/record-high-approve-black-white-marriages.aspx

That's a bit deceptive due to the large African American population in Alabama, which would obviously nearly unanimously back interracial marriage. In 2000, AL was 71% white, 26% black, 3% other. Meaning that in all likelihood, a majority of whites in Alabama voted to uphold the interracial marriage ban. Meanwhile, if you put the vote up in a nearly 100% white state such as Vermont or Maine, it would've passed with much more than 60%.

There's also the question of the veracity of that data to begin with. I highly doubt only 4% of people approved of interracial marriage in 1960.

So you're going to compare a racially polarized state with a fraught racial history (Alabama) to two very homogenous states that are far more liberal than the country as a whole and have/had fewer racial issues than the country as a whole (Maine, Vermont)?

Why do you highly doubt only 4 percent of people approved of interracial marriage in 1960? Were you alive in 1960?

If only 4 percent approved of it in 1960, it wouldn't have been legal in so many states. To suggest it was such a fringe idea that even a majority of African Americans were against it is simply ludicrous.

In fact, the 4% figure is based on a SINGLE Gallup poll. I can't find any other polls to corroborate it. If Gallup was our only data point for the 2012 election, we'd have been waiting for the Romney landslide.