Some Interesting Polls

So there were a couple of interesting polls while you were gone. I don’t put a lot of faith in polls because they are non-committal -- polls force answers to issues people may not care about without being prompted and they don’t require any sort of action. So polls should always be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, these two polls are enlightening.


● Poll One: Racism. The first poll comes from Rasmussen, and it’s about racism. Check out these numbers:

● 37% of Americans think “most blacks are racist.”
● 18% of Americans think most Hispanics are racist.
● 15% of Americans think most whites are racist.

Further, conservatives are more likely to see blacks as racist (49%) and more likely to see whites as racist (18%). Liberals are more likely to see whites as racist (27%) and less likely to see blacks as racist (21%). Surprisingly 31% of blacks also think that most blacks are racist, while only 24% consider most whites racist. These are fascinating numbers.

First, it’s interesting that so few people see “most” people as racist. If you listen to the liberals in the MSM or in Hollywood or in the Democratic Party, you hear a constant drumbeat that all whites are racist and that everything is about race. Based on the numbers above, only two in ten Americans buy that garbage. Even among liberals only three in ten buy this stuff. That’s a strong indication that we’re headed toward a colorblind society. Why? Because it shows that very few people see the various racial groups as monoliths who are or should be motivated by race, and it shows that few people see the issue of race being wrapped into everything. Without that, the institutions of racism and race baiting die.

Secondly, it’s fascinating that blacks not only see blacks as racist, but actually see them as more likely to be racist than whites. This again flies in the face of race-baiter rhetoric which holds that blacks cannot be racist because they are an oppressed minority. It is even more fascinating that they see more racism in the black community than the white community. This is another good sign because it suggests that the public is holding the black community accountable for the open racism many within the community have displayed and it suggests an understanding that whites are not the problem black leaders have tried to sell them as. That is a necessary step to fixing race relations in this country, when everyone is held equally responsible for their attitudes toward everyone else and no one is excluded from acting properly.

● Poll Two: Rubio-ism. The second poll involves Latino support and the immigration bill. According to a poll from Latino Decisions, 54% of Latinos would back Rubio in 2016 because of his efforts to pass immigration reform. That would include half of the Latinos who voted for Obama. That goes away, however, if the immigration reform bill doesn’t pass. In that event, Rubio gets only 30% support -- 3% more than Romney and 1% less than McCain. It is also worth nothing that Romney and McCain both lost each of the following increasingly-blue, increasingly-Hispanic “swing-states”: New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida and Virginia. Bush, on the hand, won 40% of Latino voters in 2004 and he carried each of those states. Unlike McCain and Romney, Bush tried to fix the immigration system... like Rubio.

And lest you think we can make up the difference with white turnout, as talk radio continues to claim, several groups have studied the last election and they have found that it would have been impossible for Romney to win merely through white turnout because he would have needed 90% of the “missing” whites. Want proof? Ok, think of it this way. There were an estimated 4-6 million “missing” white voters. Romney lost by 5 million votes. IF there are the full six million and IF they all showed up AND IF they were ALL conservatives, he might have won. But they aren’t all conservatives. In fact, there’s no reason to think they don’t mirror the population at large. In that case, consider that Romney won whites by 59% to 40%. To make up the 5 million vote difference at the rate that Romney won whites would require that 26 million more whites vote -- four times the maximum pool of “missing” whites. The idea of winning with a white party is a delusion.

● Poll Three: More Debunking. While we’re at it, let’s debunk a myth Sarah Palin and talk radio are pushing hard all of a sudden. They are telling their followers that “the overwhelming majority” of Americans oppose the path to citizenship. Palin even claimed that Hispanics oppose the path to citizenship and that it was somehow insulting to suggest they didn’t. Oh, you betcha! Only, as is so often the case these days with conservative talkers, this is total bullship.

Exit polling data from November 2012 (reported by Fox News) found that 65% of Americans (and 77% of Hispanics) believe illegal immigrants should be given a path to citizenship. Only 29% opposed that. Similarly, a Wall Street Journal poll from April 2013 found that 64% of Americans (and 82% of Hispanics) favor a path to citizenship. Three in ten is not an overwhelming majority... unless you’re dealing with the new math. So don’t believe this when you hear it.