There is a really good diary on My Left Wing parsing a recent Gallup Poll in the context of general characteristics. The question was asked: “If Your Party Nominated A Generally Well-Qualified Candidate For WH '08 Who Was ___, Would You Vote For That Person?” with blanks filled in as ‘black’, ‘old’, ‘divorced’, ‘atheist’, etc. And while division and prejudice may have scored as a GOP advantage in the past (deliberately fostered, perhaps), it looks like yet another backfire in ’08. Here are some highlights:

...a full 42% say that they will not vote for [John McCain] simply on account of his age alone … A full 30% will not support a thrice-divorced man [Rudy Giuliani] as presidential nominee … [Mitt Romney’s] Mormonism is still his biggest obstacle. A full 24% of Americans say that they just won't vote for a Mormon … if we take the poll at face value, a female candidate starts at a six point disadvantage behind a black candidate--and statistically[sic] equivalent to a Hispanic president, which is rather surprising given that Hispanics are the GOP xenophobic target-du-jour.

Even so, NONE of the Democratic frontrunner candidates in the field have anything CLOSE to the sorts of simply inherent personal negative attributes that the GOP field does. No divorces. No religious difficulties. No age issues. We can certainly argue that society should be free of such prejudices--but it isn't. And we'll certainly take what we can get, since such prejudices usually work against us, rather than for us.

The diary rightly cautions not to read too much into this. As my wife (the statistician) will tell you, polls attempting to index attitudinal data on social prejudice are notoriously unreliable. People often indicate what they believe is the socially correct response rather than what they truly believe – in other words, passive bigots rarely admit it on paper but this says little about their actual vote. I’m also reluctant to rejoice in the existence of prejudice even when it works in my favor, but after six years of radical decline, I’m willing to take hope in whatever bitter pill it comes.