46% of Mississippi Republicans Oppose Interracial Marriage

The blogosphere is buzzing with the results of a Public Policy Polling poll of Mississippi Republicans showing that a plurality (46%) think interracial marriage should be illegal while only 40% think it should be legal. For information purposes, all laws banning interracial marriage were struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court in the 1967 landmark case Loving v. Virginia.

The self-evident fact that most Mississippi Republicans are bigits is not surprising, what is really interesting is the analysis of which Presidential candidates the Republicans who think "miscegenation" should be illegal support. 

The American Prospect bog TAPPED has the analysis:

We asked voters on this poll whether they think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal- 46% of Mississippi Republicans said it should be illegal to just 40% who think it should be legal. For the most part there aren't any huge divides in how voters view the candidates or who they support for the nomination based on their attitudes about interracial marriage but there are a few exceptions. 

Palin's net favorability with folks who think interracial marriage should be illegal (+55 at 74/19) is 17 points higher than it is with folks who think interracial marriage should be legal (+38 at 64/26.) Meanwhile Romney's favorability numbers see the opposite trend. He's at +23 (53/30) with voters who think interracial marriage should be legal but 19 points worse at +4 (44/40) with those who think it should be illegal.

It's worth noting those 46 percent of Mississippi Republicans who oppose interracial marriage -- and think it should be illegal -- are in the small minority of whites nationwide who oppose race mixin'. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, 75 percent of whites approve of interracial marriages (or at least, those between blacks and whites). That number jumps up to 85 percent for whites between the ages of 18

I would love to see polling of Republicans nationwide on interracial marriage and whether public accommodations (schools, parks, buses, etc) should be racially segregated. But I bet they wouldn't really tell the pollster what they think.