Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
I think you're missing how disliked Romney is among the conservative Republicans in the South. Sure, there will be some "anything is better than Obama" votes and some "anything is better than a nigger" votes. But there will also be, I suspect, a significant number of people who normally vote Republican for President who won't be able to bring themselves to vote for Romney. Thinking about it more, it may be that those numbers point to just the opposite of what you're saying: it may well be a case of SC's Repubs being *more* conservative than Georgia's, therefore more likely to see little/no difference between Obama and Romney, and therefore more likely to either sit it out, or vote their consciences by writing in someone like Santorum or Palin.
Ultimately, the big part of my thinking from the day I made that semi-prediction is that a Romney nomination would lose enough conservative Repubs to hand Obama a deep south state or two, since I suspect that there will be another very strong black voter turnout.
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That may be, but look at the numbers I cited above - Obama in SC amongst white voters was 26% - which is a substantial statistical difference from the MS / LA / AL group. What I'm curious about is why he's doing that much better in SC; Is it just culturally closer to a GA or an NC than it is to the deeper southern states? Ie, I take your point for 2012 - what I'm trying to understand is in 2008, what made SC give as much of the white vote to Obama as it did, in comparison to the other deep south states. Ie, looking at 2008 data for the South alone (excluding Florida), you can almost sub-categorize:
The strongly competitive
- VA (39%)
- KY (36%)
- NC (35%)
- TN (34%)
- AK (30%)
All have at least one major city you can point or urban center that you can see driving the white vote, and Arkansas has the weird dichotomy of still being almost a complete Democratic state at levels other than federal.
The next tier
- OK (29%)
- SC (26%)
- TX (26%)
- GA (23%) (ps, given JIMGA's thoughts, interesting Obama did worse in GA than SC!!!)
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The "no chance in hell"
- LA (14%)
- MS (11%)
- AL (10%)