Could racism put Romney in the White House?

Article courtesy of the Daily Mail via The Rundown

While Barack Obama abandoned the campaign trail earlier this week and retreated to Washington to oversee the storm-relief effort (doubtless hoping to persuade wavering voters of his leadership qualities in the process), the man who could blow him out of office next Tuesday knew exactly where he needed to be.

For more than a month now, Mitt Romney has been virtually encamped in Ohio, the too-close-to-call ‘swing-state’ that history decrees he must win if he is to reach the White House. And it was there I found him -  blue-check shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up ready for work – collecting donations for flood victims, in a high-school gym.

As part of his brilliantly calibrated autumn push that – together with Obama’s curiously disengaged and uninspiring performance on the stump – transformed the Republican challenger from no-hoper to narrow leader in the latest polls, Romney’s sense of place and timing was unerring.

In 2008, Obama won 43 percent of the white vote; this time just 37 percent support him, according to the latest polls, and pundits believe his re-election is in serious jeopardy unless he can increase that figure.

CNN political analyst L.Z. Granderson says: ‘What we’re beginning to see is that the Republicans are increasingly white, while the Democrats are losing the white people.’

Explaining this racial schism, Mark Anthony Neal, cultural and black studies professor at Duke University in North Carolina, says white voters have allowed Obama less time to turn the economy around than they would have given a white president.

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