Race and Obama

Sean Wilentz:

Race has primarily played a factor to help Barack Obama. Not only with the African-American vote, which is fairly clear, I mean it's obviously clear, but with some white voters as well. I think that the idea that Hillary Clinton has suddenly gained a lot of support from racists, which we call "low information" voters, things like that, is just a myth. I mean, in fact, if you look over the exit polls, she's done much better in the votes since March, in fact, most of that support can be accounted for over the last three months, for greater support among upper and middle income white voters. It's not [these] mythic Appalachian, racist whites. That's a very small percentage of her pickup over Obama over the past three months. So I just don't buy it. I think certainly there's an element of that there, but I think that it's very, very small.

From a roundtable at Salon.com