PITTSBURGH: John Duffey shakes his head as he recalls bruising racial encounters with his fellow Americans. From morning to night since May he has been working the phones on behalf of Barack Obama.

“People say, ‘I like the guy. I like what he stands for. I like his plans, vision, but I am still undecided.’ That has to be the race issue,” says Duffey.

Others say outright they will not vote for a black man.

Duffey, an official with the Construction Workers’ Union, works alongside his wife, daughter and two nephews at a phone bank in the headquarters of the United Steelworkers of America, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. An African-American, he said: “It is actually a hurtful feeling that in 2008 people can’t get over the race issue.”

In another room Kaitlin Decero, a 22-year-old intern from Indiana, is also on the phone on behalf of Obama. The team she works with averages about 300 calls an hour and race comes up a lot.

People who have voted Democrat in the past tell her they will not be doing so this time. “Some people will say openly, ‘he is a black’, ‘I do not trust him’, ‘he is an Arab’, ‘he is a Muslim’, ‘he was not born in America’. They use the ‘n-word’. We just hang up.” Decero puts the ratio of bad calls to good at about 1 in 20.

The impact of race is the big unknown in this election. The lingering fear among Democrats is that 2008 will be a repeat of 1982 – and subsequent races involving black candidates – when Tom Bradley lost the California governor’s contest in spite of polls suggesting he had a lead of between nine per cent and 22 per cent. White voters had lied in huge numbers to pollsters about their real feelings.

Pollsters now believe the so-called “Bradley effect” has largely disappeared, partly because polling techniques are better at detecting racism and partly because of a cultural change in America, with those under the ago of 50 less concerned about race than their parents.

Scott Keeter, of the Washington-based Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press, which conducts regular surveys on cultural attitudes, said: “I would not say that the [Bradley] effect is gone completely, but I think it will be substantially smaller than in the past, if it appears at all. [But] I think it’s prudent to acknowledge that we are at least partially in uncharted waters ... this is our first general election with an African-American nominee.”

There was serious concern among the Obama campaign a month ago that, with polls showing him in a dead heat with his Republican opponent John McCain, lack of enthusiasm on the part of blue-collar white voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan might cost him the election. That concern has since diminished because of the economic crisis that is pushing the undecided behind Obama.

Mike Harms, an Amalgamated Transit Union official and one of the organisers of the phone banks in Pittsburgh, said: “I do believe people are beginning to see that the only colour that matters in this election is green [the dollar]. When it comes to pocketbook issues, people will put race behind them.”

Canvassers in Pittsburgh’s working-class neighbourhoods – which have been among the most resistant to Obama – confirm that while there are still a lot of “undecideds”, support for him is on the rise. But, as in other states with big concentrations of blue-collar white workers, this is more a vote against the Republicans than a vote for Obama.

As those campaigners who have been targeting union members elsewhere in the US have found, supporters leafleting outside the Anchor Hocking Glass Company in Beaver Falls, outside Pittsburgh, at 6am, encountered a sullen response, not entirely due to the early hour.

Their leaflet directly confronted concerns about Obama, saying the election was about economic issues, health and union rights and “not about fear ...anti-American, black, celebrity, elitist, Muslim, terrorist”. Many of the glass workers refused to take a leaflet. Some screwed up their faces when they saw the canvassers’ Obama T-shirts.

Leading the canvassers was Jason Altmire, a Democratic congressman for the district who is up for re-election on November 4.

He described the first hour outside the gate as “the worst response we have seen in a long time”. Having Obama on the ticket did not help him in the district, he said, adding that he was concerned about the impact of canvassing alongside people in Obama T-shirts.

Wayne Boyer, a 54-year-old African-American salesman and an Obama supporter, said racism was evident in the way that white Americans clung to their wallets when they saw him walking down the street. The fear among them, he said, was that, as president, Obama “is going to push black values”.

Obama’s inner circle plays down race, apart from when it was forced to deal with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright row earlier this year. Talking about race, they believe, will cost Obama votes. They also hope the number of people who will vote against him because he is black will be outweighed by young and African-American voters.

But Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator who has been with Obama from the start, admitted last week: “You can’t be involved in this election without feeling unease about race in this country.”

Racism in northern cities and rural areas can be as virulent as in the south. Tom Tuttle, 60, a white security guard and Vietnam veteran who is undecided, told canvassers in Brookline, a working-class area in Pittsburgh, that racism was common in the city. “It is an underlying racism. At least down south you knew they hated them. Here people have to do it behind their backs ... I think seriously someone will kill the man.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service