Majority of White Southerners Doubt Obama’s US Birth

Steve Benen observed that belief in “birther” conspiracy theories is quite rare outside of Dixie, but strikingly common in the South:

Dave Weigel had the clever idea of getting in touch with the original pollster to explore the issue of how this looks when you restrict yourself to the white south:

So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While [pollster Del] 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.

One thing to keep in mind, if only a quarter or a fifth of white Southerners believe Obama was born in the United States, that’s more than voted for him last year in some states. Obama won 14 percent of the white vote in Louisiana, 14 percent in Mississippi, and 10 percent in Alabama.

I think Republicans have basically given up on the battle of trying to win more Hispanics over to their side. Which leaves them with the medium-term objective of trying to get non-southern whites to act more like southern whites.