For some people--esp southern white men--it is: what you can't get away from is that there are men who think they are 'woke' and 'progressive' but harbor bias that even they are not honest with themselves about.
If it helps to have a white guy in whom they can see themselves on the ticket then that is what will happen.
Don't allow your--and my--aspirational world view to get in the way of understanding that most people, esp those in a southern patriarchal culture, do not know what makes them tick or what is triggering them. They will come up with all manner of rationalizations before admitting to themselves that what 'rubs them wrong' is that they have been raised in a place where 'biracial women married to Jews' are 'othered'. Less than.
Many of these guys intuitively want to do better but they need someone they see themselves in to feel a permission structure to be persuadable.
A quick story from my childhood in rural East Texas outside Houston in the '60s: my grandfather was one of the premier construction workers in the south. He put the statues in front of UT Austin. He was also a Lyndon Johnson Democrat, he watched Walter Cronkite every night with me on his lap. Not a stupid man or a cruel man. He loathed that stupid war.
And sometimes he would have the black men he worked with over for cards: a major gesture of decency at a time when some of the neighbors really didn't approve. Pappy didn't care, it wasn't about what the neighbors thought of him.
But when I was teenager, who'd integrated Pappy's lessons on race and how you treat people, I was totally disoriented when, out of nowhere one day, he told me that he thought the world of his 'n*****' friends but that if I ever thought to bring one home, I'd best not come home. I was crushed and confused.
See, he wasn't a 'racist' in the way many were back then; not the bastards who murdered civil rights workers. In fact, if he could have, he would have stopped that.
But he was the best he could be at the time. He went as far as he could, at the time. And now that looks different: these guys are trying to go as far as they can but they need some help. They need someone to tell them that going outside their comfort zone and voting for the biracial woman married to the Jew is the right thing to do and that the ghost of their Pappys will not haunt them, shaking their heads in disappointment and disapproval. And it doesn't matter what Pappy thinks cause he's dead.
And not for nothing, but notwithstanding how deeply hurt and confused I was to find out that my Pappy was grossly imperfect in ways I never expected, when I finally settled into a relationship, it was with a big black guy who's smarter than the average coconut. And once I got past the moment of imagining Pappy's disapproval, I never thought about it again.
People are imperfect: right now we need to give them permission to do better.
