Obama, race, and Kentucky voters: some data

From R.G. Dunlop in the C-J...

It was no great surprise that Barack Obama, who lost Kentucky by 16 percentage points to Republican John McCain in the Nov. 4 election, carried Jefferson and Fayette counties, the state's largest and most urban.

He'd won them in the May primary -- the only two counties he carried -- when Sen. Hillary Clinton claimed a landslide victory.

But in the general election Obama also carried five small, rural counties with relatively few African-American residents: Rowan, Elliott, Wolfe and Menifee in Eastern Kentucky, and Hancock, on the Ohio River in Western Kentucky.

He also won Henderson County, a more populous Western Kentucky county with a significantly larger black population, about 7 percent.

Longtime Morehead State University administrator Keith Kappes explains the vote in his Rowan County simply: "I think people put aside their concerns about race and religion and voted for hope.

"I think a lot of folks were motivated by the national criticism that we (residents of Appalachia) were a bunch of rednecks, that we wouldn't vote for Obama because he was black, or allegedly not a Christian," said Kappes, Morehead State's vice president for university relations. "It was sort of a 'we'll show you' attitude."

Yet while he and more than two dozen others interviewed for this story had theories about how Obama carried those few rural counties, there was no single, definitive answer....

The article goes on at great length about those various answers. The most likely: Race mattered to some extent-- at the margin (vs. Clinton)-- but not enough for a typical Dem to cross the line and vote for McCain (especially in tough economic times)...

If that's correct, it's good news, bad news: some people are bigoted, but not that bigoted.