For White Working Class, Obama Rises on Empty Wallets

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The two women wouldn't give me their names. They said they were worried about what the store's owner might think. The reason I've mentioned them is that later, when those poll results came in, I recalled another thing the woman behind the counter had volunteered. "I would hate to think that anyone would vote against Obama because of who he is," she said, "but I also don't like the idea of people voting for him just because he's black."

Voters in the national poll were asked about that very issue, and overwhelmingly — by more than 9 to 1 — they said Obama's race won't be a factor in how they vote. Even among black voters, only 1 in 6 said they would take Obama's race into account. Still, the question hovers over the campaign. A controversial recent survey by the Associated Press pushed white participants to react to a list of negative racial stereotypes. One-third of them put credence in at least one of the unpleasant generalizations about blacks. After some complicated statistical legerdemain, the AP concluded that race could cost Obama up to 6 percentage points on Election Day.

The TIME poll asked voters whether they "personally know anyone who is more likely" — or less likely — "to vote for Obama because of his race." Again, most people said no, but this time the margin was narrower. Forty-four percent said they knew someone who would be less likely to vote for Obama, while 38% said Obama's race would be a plus for someone they knew.

My trip took me several times across the wide, brown Missouri River, and it occurred to me that these issues of skin color and tribe have haunted these parts at least since Lewis and Clark paddled the liquid highway westward. But as I listened to voters, what became clear was that the Obama campaign is not the simple racial referendum some commentators have pictured. I heard several reasons why voters might be reluctant to support the guy, but race was rarely cited.

"I like him, but he has so little experience," Cheryl Collier told me when I visited her bookstore near the train station in Lee's Summit. "He's an amazingly gifted orator, and you think, If only he could show where he has accomplished the things he talks about."

I met people who disagreed with Obama over abortion rights. I met people who won't vote for him because they fear that he'll raise their taxes. Sarah Roy, an Obama supporter who owns a scrapbooking store in Warrensburg, told me that her husband is in the military; he plans to vote against Obama because McCain is a fellow warrior. In other words, if Obama — a first-term Senator with an exotic name, liberal politics and a thin résumé — doesn't win, it will be for a lot of the same reasons other Democrats have lost, including the fact that Americans have leaned toward Republican Presidents for nearly 60 years.

Obama certainly seems to see it that way. "The fact of the matter is, people have been continually looking for how race will impact this campaign," he recently told a television interviewer. With only a month to go and his support surging in Virginia — the capital of the old Confederacy — the impact appears to be minimal, Obama said.

'Haven't We Evolved?'

I met Kim Cannon on a bench outside the Hair Design Team salon in Troy, where she was taking a smoking break between customers. It was a pleasant afternoon, and from where she sat, the green hills of northeast Missouri — Mark Twain country — rolled gently in every direction. A lifelong resident of Lincoln County, Cannon has seen those hills stitched with new roads and dotted with parking lots, but not so much that she can't still spy open fields in the distance.

Politics is a popular topic at Hair Design Team. "The funniest part are my clients who say Obama is the Antichrist," Cannon said. "I just laugh." Because after months on the fence between the two candidates, Cannon has come down on Obama's side, and the reason is simple: "The economy is terrible, and he is more for the working man."