Cynical Nation

From reports last night it sounds like the parking lot incident made Ford look kind of dumb, and that may have hurt him more than anything else.

I guess the thing is that you can never really tell with race since it's not likely that voters who do use that as a deciding factor are going to admit to it, whether in Tennessee or in Maryland.

Oh, drats. I thought it was HENRY Ford running; he's an anti-semite so thats why I didn't vote for him. My mistake.

I think that Steele would've won in Tennessee and Ford in Maryland. They both ran good campaigns and ended up doing better than their party had done in recent Senate races in that state.

Few will ever admit to being racist, but I would wager there are still quite a few people here in TN who would NEVER vote for a black person. There has not been a black Senator in the South since reconstruction. That can't be a coincidence.

Still, Ford garnered 48% of the vote, which is quite good. He's only 36, so we'll be hearing from him in future.

> I think that Steele would've won in Tennessee and Ford in Maryland.

I think you're right. Pity they couldn't have swapped. Oh well.

However, in the article Barry posted, the writer wrote about the phenomena where Black candidates do worse than the polls predicted because voters supposedly are more racist once they are alone in a voting booth.

Yesterday, however, Ford actually outperformed the polls.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2006/senate/tn/tennessee_senate_race-20.html

I think what you had in Tennessee, New Jersey, and Maryland are states with voters more concerned about the national implications of what party they are voting for rather than the character of the individual.

Along with all my other predictions, I was right about Ford losing as well.

People are racists, as they should be. All this political correctness just makes them lie to pollsters.

There is no question that the racist TV ad of the RNC had an effect in the Tenessee race. The good news is that the obviously racist candidate in Virginia (George Allen) was defeated. That was great news .

I think Allen lost for being a dork, not racism.

"Few will ever admit to being racist, but I would wager there are still quite a few people here in TN who would NEVER vote for a black person. There has not been a black Senator in the South since reconstruction. That can't be a coincidence.

Still, Ford garnered 48% of the vote, which is quite good. He's only 36, so we'll be hearing from him in future." (Tracy Miller)
"Steele brings nothing to the table but the color of his skin," and (2) Maryland's history of having had ZERO blacks run on either their national or statewide ticket. Just mouthing platitudes and saying "I'm against bigotry," doesn't make it so...and Maryland's Democratic Party is pretty close to proving that.

Why would blacks vote for "Uncle Tom" Steele or any other black Republican?

They all saw how Chimp, Brownie and the Repug congress just sat around doing nothing, hoping they would all die after Katrina.

Then Chimp had them dispersed all over the country and attempted to remake New Orleans into another Repug stronghold, full of gibbering religious imbeciles.