By now, you’ve probably heard about the strange exit poll that was conducted in South Carolina during last week’s election. Voters in Charleston, Columbia, Greenville, and Spartanburg were asked, among other things, whether they thought blacks were getting “too demanding” in pushing for equality. Well, the man who conducted it now seems to realize that it was a colossal fail.
David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University, and his research colleague, doctoral candidate Paul White of the University of South Carolina, thought they’d stumbled on a golden opportunity in the 2014 midterms. Not only was Tim Scott running to become the first popularly elected black Senator from a Southern state since Reconstruction, but South Carolina’s other Senator, Lindsey Graham, was on the ballot as well. They decided to use questions from a psychological test dating from the 1980s.
However, Woodard and White didn’t bank on the level of criticism they got. And it turns out the condemnation came from both sides of the spectrum. White told WSPA-TV in Spartanburg, “You had liberals getting offended. You had conservatives getting offended.” Woodard told Talking Points Memo that they weren’t prepared for the reaction to having such questions asked face-to-face. “We didn’t dream them up,” he said, “but of course, that didn’t mean we should have asked them.”
Little late for that, isn’t it? You would have thought that Woodard would have known that asking these kinds of questions and passing them off as an exit poll was a rotten idea in the first place. But apparently he isn’t as contrite as he seemed to be. He plans to publish his findings at some point. Given the ethical minefield he stepped in, though, I have to hope he reconsiders those plans.
As a side note, Woodard says his research proved that voters in South Carolina and other Southern states cast their ballots based more on personality and ideology than race. You don’t need to do any really exhaustive research to know that. After all, anyone who’s watched the news and followed social media over the last six years would know that the hatred against President Obama isn’t racist–for the most part, anyway. Rather, it’s motivated by the fact that a significant minority of the American people–not just in the South, but elsewhere–doesn’t consider ANY Democrat in the White House to be legitimate. This element is perfectly fine with voting for a black candidate–just as long as, like Scott, that candidate is essentially Ted Cruz or Jim Inhofe with black skin.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC on Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
