Dave Weigel at the Washington Independent breaks down the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll even further and finds this startling bit of news:
So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president’s citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama’s citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South’s “don’t know” number to 30 percent and it’s “born outside the United States” number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn’t know where Obama was born.
What do we do about this? I think we need to do more than just make fun of them. There’s a serious issue here – a significant number of people are not recognizing reality. How do we get them back on the right track? All attempts by Republican leaders to do anything results in them being called RINOs and chased out of the party. Is there someone they trust who can change things?
I grew up in Kentucky, which is a beautiful place full of extremely smart and talented people but I felt like I was pushed out of the area. It’s not like people told me to leave, but I felt extremely stifled by the rigid authoritarianism of the area. It was very difficult to be even slightly deviated from normal there (like be a liberal or be a female scientist).