I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A new AP/Yahoo survey shows that there may be enough latent racism among Democrats and independents to cost Obama the election in November.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 – about 2.5 percentage points…
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents – voters Obama can’t win the White House without – agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views…
“There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean there’s only a few bigots,” said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey…
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
The study was designed to make people more likely to admit to their prejudices:
The AP-Yahoo poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.
To be frank, this has been a concern of mine all along, that the polls are not reflecting the reality of such prejudice because people aren’t likely to admit to a pollster that they have misgivings about Obama based on his skin color. But when they get into the voting booth by themselves, will they pull the lever for Obama? This survey found that 58% of those who agreed with at least one negative adjective about black people still planned to vote for him. But in an election that is going to be very close, it won’t take many people who choose not to do so to determine the outcome.
Update: For a dissenting view, see this post by Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, who is frankly far more qualified than I to evaluate the methodology and legitimacy of this survey.
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