Poll: Few Think Race Relations Better Under Obama

Nearly half of the voters in the nation's battleground states believe race relations have gotten worse since President Barack Obama took office, according to a new Politico poll,  while just 6 percent of the respondents believe matters have improved.

In the online survey, 46 percent said race relations worsened since Obama first took office in 2009. Another 48 percent, meanwhile, said relations have remained the same.

The survey of 917 likely voters for competitive U.S. House and Senate races was conducted between Aug. 29 and Sept. 7, just as weeks of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, was ending after a white police officer shot unarmed African-American 18-year-old, Michael Brown.

The poll was conducted online by the research firm GfK, and had a margin error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points for the full sample.

Black and white voters were divided on the issue, Politico further reported, with 49 percent of the white voters saying relations are worse and 38 percent of the black voters. But they were evenly divided, at 47 percent each, on relations being the same.

Four percent of the white voters said relations are improving, compared to 13 percent of African-American voters.

And among Hispanics, 14 percent said relations have changed for the better, 56 percent said relations remain the same and 30 percent say they have gotten worse.

One of Obama's frequent critics, talk-show host Tavis Smiley, over the weekend,  continued to criticize the president on race issues, claiming that "black people lost ground in every single leading economic category during the Obama years."

"We’ve been at the back of the bus," he said. "Every other constituency has spoken their truth and made demands of this president."

But Smiley said he wasn't making his comments as a way of "demonizing the president or casting an aspersion on him, but the data is going to indicate that black people lost ground in every single leading economic category during the Obama years."

Smiley, 50, hosts a late-night talk show on PBS. He has been an Obama critic throughout his term, along with author and Union Theological Seminary professor Cornel West.

Obama's election was largely seen as a changing point in the country's history, reports Politico, and Obama addressed racial issues a few times. He sent Attorney General Eric Holder to address protests after Brown's shooting, and spoke in personal terms after Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was shot, saying that the boy "could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago."

Further, he started "My Brother's Keeper," an initiative to help "boys and young men of color" reach their potential.


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