When it Comes to Politics, Are We More Racist Than We Think?

People are usually reluctant to admit their real feelings in surveys, but there's no doubt that our experiences and our prejudices play a part in the way we vote. In order to figure out whether racial bias
affected Barack Obama's results in the 2008 presidential election, Seth
Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard
University, passed over easy-to-manipulate surveys and looked at data
from another source: online searches.




When most people are searching for information online, they're likely to
be alone and less likely to censor their thoughts, he explains. "You
may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in
polite company," he writes in a New York Times article. "I certainly have. The majority of Americans have as well: We Google the word 'porn' more often than the word 'weather'."



He chose a common racial insult that starts with "N" and looked for
searches that used the singular and plural forms of the word. "The most
common searches including the epithet… return websites with derogatory
material about African-Americans," he writes in his study.
"The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all
textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing
stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's
presence."



That held true for searches from 2004 through 2007 (searches for "n**ga"
led mostly to rap lyrics, which he disregarded for this study). "I used
data from 2004 to 2007 because I wanted a measure not directly
influenced by feelings toward Mr. Obama," he writes in the New York
Times.



But from 2008 on, he discovered, "Obama" was one of the most prevalent search terms in racially tinged online searches.




After gathering information on the racially charged search queries,
Stephens-Davidowitz took a look at voting data from around the country
and compared each area's 2008 results, when Obama was running for
president, to voting results from 2004, when all of the candidates were
white.



Though many people believe that our first African-American president won
the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American
voters, Stephens-Davidowitz's research shows that those votes only added
about 1 percentage point to Obama's totals. "In the general election,
this effect was comparatively minor," he concludes. But in areas with
high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked
against him, sometimes significantly.



"The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in
the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points
and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,"
Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. "This implies racial animus
gave Obama's opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage
country-wide."



"Any votes Obama gained due to his race in the general election were not
nearly enough to outweigh the cost of racial animus, meaning race was a
large net negative for Obama," he adds.





Even if states that are considered fairly liberal, racism is prevalent
enough in certain areas to put the entire state high up on the list.
"Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania,
eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi,"
Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his New York Times article.



The 10 states with the fewest racially charged searches were Utah,
Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Washington DC, Minnesota, Oregon,
Montana, and Wyoming.



What does this mean for this year's contest? "Losing even two percentage
points lowers the probability of a candidate's winning the popular vote
by a third," Stephens-Davidowitz explains. "Prejudice could cost Mr.
Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania."

Any opinions on this?