Blacks overwhelming vote for Obama; are they racist?

A new NBC/WSJ poll has determined that 94% of African-Americans support Barack Obama, compared to 0% who support Mitt Romney.

Romney is white, and blacks don't like him. Obama is black, and blacks like him. Do the math - blacks are racist, and finally we have the proof.

You can hear this sort of claim from some on the Right all the time, but is it true?

Simply, no. I mean, black Americans are probably about as racist as any other kind of American, but their support for Obama isn't proof of anything much. More important than Obama's race is that he is a Democrat, and blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Below is from CNN's analysis of the 2004 election in which the incumbent George W Bush defeated Democratic challenger John Kerry.

Blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry too, and he's white. They probably would have voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton had she defeated Obama leading up to the 2008 election. As a matter of fact, blacks have voted overwhelmingly for white candidates in every election until 2008. Which is mighty tolerant of them.

Of course, Obama does have a higher level of black support than most previous white Democratic candidates, but it's a matter of degree. Republicans have trouble admitting it, but the reason blacks don't vote for them is because they are the de facto white people's party. The Republicans suck so bad at seeming racially enlightened that they make the Dems look like saints, which they're not.

A more interesting question would be: would blacks vote overwhelmingly for a black Republican candidate?

Well it hasn't happened yet since until Obama neither party had nominated a black candidate for President. Some have tried, yet the campaigns of Alan Keyes and Herman Cain stirred little enthusiasm amongst the black community. Had either of them somehow won the Republican nomination, we could perhaps expect a slight increase in the black vote for Republicans, but little more. Primarily because neither of them was ever a strong candidate.

Hypothetically, Colin Powell would have been an interesting choice. He was often talked about as a nominee, and in 1995 held a press conference to announce he did not intend to run. Against a white Democratic candidate, Powell would potentially have snared a sizable chunk of the black vote. Against Gore in 2000 he could have even got a majority. But Powell is a moderate. Compare him to Mitt Romney. The current Republican nominee seems to epitomise one of his party's central philosophies; that the rich and powerful are that way because they deserve it, and the downtrodden are that way because they just don't work hard enough. Don't expect that to sit well with a community who know full well that life is not a level playing field.