A pollster on the racial panic Obama's presidency triggered -- and what Democrats must do now

http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/12/12/13894546/obama-race-black-white-house-cornell-belcher-racism

From the site:

Belcher lays out [the idea] in detail in his new book, A Black Man in the White House. In it, he makes the case that Obama’s election triggered what he’s dubbed “America's racial aversion crisis”: a panicked emotional response on the part of white Americans to an African-American president, which transformed into a powerful force in politics.

Belcher uses numbers to support that claim. The book was inspired by a survey of voters between the 2008 general election and Obama’s reelection in 2012, tracking levels of “racial antagonism” — a term that basically means racism — along with political opinions.

His conclusion, as he wrote in his book: “The changing cultural and racial demographics of the country had, indeed, finally allowed the nation to overcome a monumental electoral political barrier, but they did not ‘exorcize the racial ghost.’” That “racial ghost,” he writes, worked to “delegitimize the black man in the White House and stop him from effectively governing.”