If you read the recent press about this survey, which was designed to gauge public opinion about race, you would conclude that Obama has a huge mountain to climb to cancel out the racist vote. According to one of the AP stories, “one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them ‘lazy,’ ‘violent,’ responsible for their own troubles”.

First problem - the graph shows the percentage of white Democrats answering “lazy” to be 10%, and “violent” 13%. I wasn’t a math major, but both of these responses look to be far south of one-third.

Second problem - according to the survey, the answers from the black respondents (about 12%) don’t appear to be significantly different than all respondents. I suspect that if you asked the same question of whites, Hispanics, Asians, or Americans in general, you would probably get similar answers.

Clearly there are still race issues in this country that put Obama at a disadvantage. But in order to properly quantify it, we would first need to do a survey to assess the inherent bias against rich, old guys who don’t know how many homes they own.