Survey: Racial resentment key to 2012 presidential election

CLINTON, N.Y., May 21 (UPI) -- In 2008 when Barack Obama first ran for president, he talked about a post-racial age but a U.S. survey indicates Americans still divided by racial attitudes.

The survey conducted by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., included four questions commonly used by social science researchers to measure racial resentment to gauge these racial attitudes.

The questions are:

-- "Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors."

-- "Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class."

-- "Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve."

-- "It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites."

Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College said the respondents were then asked if they agreed strongly, agreed somewhat, disagreed strongly or disagreed somewhat with each statement.

Obama won overwhelmingly among the approximately one-third of voters with the least amount of racial resentment, he ran about even among those with moderate levels of resentment and lost in a landslide among those with the highest levels of racial resentment, Klinkner said.

"A substantial portion of Republicans is inclined to accept the worst about President Obama, regardless of facts, and believe that he is not a legitimate president, making it extremely difficult for him to overcome partisan polarization," the center said in a statement.

Going into the 2012 election, both Democrats and Republicans expressed concern about the fairness of the election and only 15 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats said they were very confident the election would be decided fairly.

However, after the election, fears about voter fraud abated among Democrats but skyrocketed among Republicans, with 58 percent of Republicans saying they were not confident at all about the fairness of the election. Thirty-two percent of Republicans said voter fraud and intimidation in big urban areas had a big impact on the election, 49 percent said urban voter fraud and intimidation had some impact and 19 percent said it had no impact.

The survey was conducted by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College as part of the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study.

The Hamilton component of the pre-election wave surveyed 1,000 people Oct. 1 to Nov. 5. The post-election wave surveyed 837 of the pre-election respondents Nov. 7 to Dec. 9. The margin of error for the pre-election wave is approximately 3.1 percentage points and for the post-election wave, approximately 3.4 percentage points.