It appears that I failed to capture the complexity of racism in America. My racist was a guy who believed in the superiority of the white race. Picture a Klansman without the robe. Or maybe Bob Ewell, Mayella's hated-filled father from To Kill a Mockingbird, who attacks Jem and Scout after the school pagent and breaks Jem's arm. What do I know? I don't know these people. I was sketching out something blind. It turns out there is a range of racial biases. Let's turn to science for something more accurate.
Charles Franklin over at Pollster.com - who happens to be a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin - crunches some numbers and finds the undecideds will break about 50/50 between McCain and Obama. Three different polls have recently included the following question in their presidential campaign polling:
I'd like you to tell me whether you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement: African Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing.
Okay, we can argue whether or not this digs deep enough to reveal racial animosity. The problem, of course, is if you ask someone if they hate blacks, they might very well deny it, even if they harbor animosities and fears and resentments that we would call, by almost any objective definition, racist. What is nice about this question is that we are asking respondents to characterize blacks, not themselves, but in the process we get a glimpse at respondents' attitudes. Franklin's finding is fascinating, and undercuts Silver's (and my) argument: among undecided voters, 27% strongly agree and 32% somewhat agree that African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing." Among the wider public, 26% of the nation strongly believes African Americans "use race to justify wrongdoing" and 32% somewhat believe so. In other words, undecided voters don't appear to be different from the public at large in their racial attitudes. About a quarter of the nation evidences a strong racial bias, and the group of voters who remain undecided mirror this.
So, as things tighten up, take courage. I may have been wrong, and my earlier reassurances may not have been strong enough. Looking at polls might give us a good sense of what the final outcome will be, and undecided voters are not going to spoil the party.
Another source of anxiety related to polls: McCain and his spokesmen keep saying things about how unreliable polls are. Their argument seems to be that the polls are all over the place - some show McCain pulling closer in battleground states, others don't, some show the national race a tie, others give Obama a ten-point advantage. Polls, they are saying, can't be trusted. Okay. Take a breath. The polling numbers you see on Pollster or Fivethirtyeight are aggregates, reaching into the many, many polls taken, inputting some well-thought-out trend adjustments and other carefully applied statistical tunings. So the variations the McCain campaign is pointing to have already been addressed in the final numbers spit out by Charles Franklin, Mark Blumenthal, and Nate Silver. You can make an argument about their methods and the choices they make to weigh different factors - and lots of numbers geeks do, contributing to lengthy discussions on both sites. But in the end, there seems to be a high-level of confidence in their results.
Why would you be accepting any assessment of scientific findings from a Republican anyway? Think about it. This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Their approach to sowing doubt about global warming and evolution is the same method the McCain campaign is using now. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans (and the McCain campaign) is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.
It reminds me a little bit of my two-year-old. When all evidence available tells us that he is tired and should go to bed, he resists, offering spirited arguments, usually using claims that have nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence. But Daddy I want to watch Caillou. I'm hungry. Can I have a bar? I want to play with my cars. Then some nights he has a tantrum. But he is just postponing the inevitable. The McCain campaign is doing the same thing - offering arguments unrelated to the evidence, throwing a tantrum, and postponing the inevitable.
I'm still left scratching my head over these undecideds. What are they waiting for? How can they be confused about their choice. David Sedaris has a funny observation in the New Yorker:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
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