The Twilight of Racism

Gallup recently released data on aggregate state-by-state approval of Barack Obama in 2010. They find, among other things, that his approval declined compared to 2009 in every single state; not a shocker. More interesting, I think, is the comparison between these approval ratings and Obama's 2008 performance, something Nate Silver of 538 analyzed in some depth yesterday. He noted that Obama's approval has declined most from his actual electoral performance in swing states, probably due to his having run one hell of a ground game in '08, and also that he seems to be doing best in the South. He mentions that this might have something to do with fading racial animus against Obama as white voters grow accustomed to having a black President. I have investigated the question in a little more detail.

Here's a graph of the change in Obama's numbers, '08 election to '10 approval, as a function of the share of the white vote Obama received in 2008 (per the CNN exit polls):

Using all 50 states plus DC, the correlation is 0.6054, pretty strong, and it appears that every extra point of white voters Obama received in '08 has cost him 0.227 points of approval swing through 2010. If we exclude the two apparent outliers on the upper-right, which are Hawaii and Washington, D.C. (and it seems reasonable to me to exclude these two), then we have a correlation of 0.7122, which is really, really strong for such an obvious relation, and an extra point of white voters has cost Obama 0.283 points in shift.

The conclusion? I think it's safe to say that we are seeing some of the effect some of us thought we might see. Some racially-motivated voters in the South, probably not the most hard-core of racist voters, are noticing that, hey, there's been a black guy in the White House for two years now and the world hasn't ended! This means that some of the states where Republicans have been needing to keep Democrats one-third of the white vote, states like SC, LA, GA, AL, and MS, the "black belt," might start being just slightly non-racist enough that the Democrats might have a chance. Obama only needed 23% of the white vote in Mississippi to win it in 2008. Is it so shocking, given that fact, that Gallup has him with net-positive approval in Mississippi? I don't think it really is. Maybe the solid south is finally beginning to crumble after all.