New polling has found that Barack Obama has support amongst voters who otherwise hold negative views about African-Americans, writes Politico. The poll found that about a fifth of the white voters voters questioned “strongly agreed” with the statement that “African-Americans often use race as an excuse to justify wrongdoing”. Yet, of those who agreed, “23 percent said they’d be supporting Obama”.

“One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.

“The notion that there might be “racists for Obama”, as one Democrat called them, comes against the backdrop of a country whose white voters largely accept the notion of a black president.”

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