Inspired by Carrie Budoff-Brown’s Politico anecdotes from a Philadelphia neighborhood bar, I went to a bar in Monroeville, an eastern suburb of Pittsburgh, to gauge the fallout of the Wright controversy and Obama’s speech on race.
I went to the River Towne Pour House, an extremely popular middle-class bar in a middle-class suburb. Out of a bar population of well over a hundred mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, I managed to speak with 17 people. Of these, only 4 people planned to vote for McCain in the general, 1 said “none of the above”, 7 supported Hillary, and 5 were for Obama.
Of those supporting a Democrat, I asked whether they had made up their minds in the last couple of weeks or earlier. Without exception, each of them had decided in advance of the Wright controversy. Most of them were aware of the controversy and of Obama’s speech earlier in the week from news coverage, and none of them said that it had ultimately changed their mind about their candidate of choice.
Todd Geloso, a Generation X sales rep who is supporting Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary, said
Look, I gotta sit around with these boneheads all night, and they say s@#t that I don’t buy all the time.
His friend Tony Giancoli, a software engineer supporting Obama, had this to say about the controversy:
If my priest is out messing with alter boys, that doesn’t mean I’m doing it too.
I also asked these Democrats if the other candidate is the nominee, whether they would support him or her. All of them said yes. Most of the people I talked to were tired of the constant news coverage of the election and want it to be over. I also noticed that those who were supporting Obama tended to be younger and male, while those for Clinton tended to be older and female.
[...] Obama is viewed favorably by 71% of Democrats, essentially unchanged from the 72% on the March 12th poll. Clinton’s favorability, however, dropped 8 points to 68% since then. This confirms my earlier post from the Pittsburgh bar. [...]
I would like to come here again. It sounds god to me, and there’s a lot of interesting information here