Why many conservatives will shy away from Palin

Early reactions are mixed to John McCain's pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Heath Palin as the Republican nominee for Vice President. This we do know about her:

* Palin is anti-choice.
* She is a member of the NRA.
* She hates polar bears and is trying to get them removed from the list of endangered species.
* She is a creationist and believes creationism should be taught in our public schools.
* Eighteen months ago, she was the mayor of a town of 7,000 people.
* She's being investigated by the Alaskan legislature in an abuse-of-power scandal where she allegedly fired the Commissioner of Public Safety because he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law.
* She refused to fill out a Project VoteSmart Questionnaire two years ago, despite the urging of John McCain.

But this choice will explode in McCain's face, and I'll explain why below the fold.

It was a sad time in Democratic politics when Hillary Clinton's gender and Barack Obama's race played an important part in the campaign. It showed just how strong misogyny and racism played a strong role in some voter's preferences.

And if you think this sad trend ends with the Democratic Party, I'm here to tell you that it will become worse when this situation is viewed through the eyes of many Republicans.

While some national polls have shown that more than 90 percent or more of Americans say they'd vote for a woman as President, a study by Northern Illinois University shows otherwise. The political scientist behind the study, Matt Streb says that people are hiding their true feelings because they know that opposition to a candidate based on their gender is socially unacceptable. However, in the anonymity of the voting booth, they are much less likely to vote for a woman.

Call it the Bradley Effect for women. I know it's very sad. I'd like to see McCain and Palin lose the election based on his poor judgement and cozy relationships to lobbyists and her inexperience (she wasn't even Governor of Alaska when Obama began running for President) and Neanderthal beliefs.

But back to NIU's and Streb's study.

If people tell pollsters that they're comfortable with the idea of a female candidate, you probably won't get very far by asking them if they're really just hiding their true feelings. Instead, Streb and his NIU colleagues went at the question another way. They asked a test group of respondents to say how many of four different statements made them "angry or upset": the rising price of gas, the high salaries paid to professional athletes, pollution by large corporations and laws that require seat-belt usage. The researchers obtained a base number using those four statements, then added a fifth: "a woman serving as president." With that statement in the mix, the mean number of "angry or upset" responses increased by so much that the researchers believe that about 26 percent of their respondents were troubled by the "woman serving as president" addition.

There you have it. Unfortunately for Palin, any possible bounce she might get from disaffected Hillary supporters will be lost due to sexist perceptions. And before we start pointing the finger at men, women share equal blame in this:

According to a summary of the findings in an NIU press release, the researchers saw "virtually equal" levels of resistance among male and female respondents and "nearly equal" levels among respondents with different education levels. The researchers didn't test for the separate-but-similar question of race, but Streb surmises in the press release that the same sort of "social desirability" distortion is "almost certainly going to be a factor" in polls measuring support for Barack Obama.

The strawman argument has already been posed to me: "But people's perceptions will change because she's running for Vice President, not President. It is my opinion that many people view the Vice President as a "heartbeat away" and this unfortunate effect will not be buffered.

Furthermore, while I have no statistical evidence to support this, I've spent enough time among conservatives and evangelicals to know that these people strongly believe a woman's place is in the home and definitely not in politics. This explains their extreme distaste—and I'll even call it downright hatred—of Hillary Clinton.

Do you really think the Promise Keepers will support a ticket with a woman on it? They still believe that women are subservient to men. And what of the conservative base that praises Phyllis Schlafly, a woman who believes a women's place is in the home? Even Ann Coulter got an ovation from her fellow wingnuts when she said that women should not be allowed to vote.

When looking at the base conservatives in the Republican party, you very well may see a much higher percantage of 26 percent withholding their vote because of McCain's pick for VP. This is an unfortunate truth for the Republicans. While I think voters should only consider the character and merits of a candidate, there are many out there that will rely on their old prejudices while in the voting booth.