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.

The state with the highest racially charged search rate was West Virginia, where 41 percent of voters chose Keith Judd, a white man who is also a convicted felon currently in prison in Texas, over Obama just this May. Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 most-racist areas, according to the search queries used.

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."

OK. So... The only reason Obama will lose will be due to racism... Gotcha.
Was waiting for this. A bit earlier than I expected.

How about "You fucking suck as President".?

Nah, it's got to be the racism.

I do think a lot of the conservative reaction is race based. The birth certificate the g especially .

But the right was pretty bad to Clinton too. Its become their MO at this point. Plus when times are tough it becomes popular to scapegoat minorities n immigrants .

I'll vote for that! You are right.

Clinton was the first black POTUS so it was a racial thing with him too.

Next time you should post the article instead of an article about the article.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/09/how-racist-are-we-ask-google/

June 9, 2012, 5:46 pm
How Racist Are We? Ask Google

By SETH STEPHENS-DAVIDOWITZ
Barack Obama won 52.9 percent of the popular vote in 2008 and 365 electoral votes, 95 more than he needed. Many naturally concluded that prejudice was not a major factor against a black presidential candidate in modern America. My research, a comparison of Americans’ Google searches and their voting patterns, found otherwise. If my results are correct, racial animus cost Mr. Obama many more votes than we may have realized.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Quantifying the effects of racial prejudice on voting is notoriously problematic. Few people admit bias in surveys. So I used a new tool, Google Insights, which tells researchers how often words are searched in different parts of the United States.
Can we really quantify racial prejudice in different parts of the country based solely on how often certain words are used on Google? Not perfectly, but remarkably well. Google, aggregating information from billions of searches, has an uncanny ability to reveal meaningful social patterns. “God” is Googled more often in the Bible Belt, “Lakers” in Los Angeles.
The conditions under which people use Google — online, most likely alone, not participating in an official survey — are ideal for capturing what they are really thinking and feeling. You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company. I certainly have. The majority of Americans have as well: we Google the word “porn” more often than the word “weather.”
And many Americans use Google to find racially charged material. I performed the somewhat unpleasant task of ranking states and media markets in the United States based on the proportion of their Google searches that included the word “nigger(s).” This word was included in roughly the same number of Google searches as terms like “Lakers,” “Daily Show,” “migraine” and “economist.”
Graphic

• Racially Charged Web Searches and Voting
  
  

A huge proportion of the searches I looked at were for jokes about African-Americans. (I did not include searches that included the word “nigga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.) I used data from 2004 to 2007 because I wanted a measure not directly influenced by feelings toward Mr. Obama. From 2008 onward, “Obama” is a prevalent term in racially charged searches.
The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was West Virginia. Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi.
Once I figured out which parts of the country had the highest racially charged search rates, I could test whether Mr. Obama underperformed in these areas. I predicted how many votes Mr. Obama should have received based on how many votes John Kerry received in 2004 plus the average gain achieved by other 2008 Democratic Congressional candidates. The results were striking: The higher the racially charged search rate in an area, the worse Mr. Obama did.
Consider two media markets, Denver and Wheeling (which is a market evenly split between Ohio and West Virginia). Mr. Kerry received roughly 50 percent of the votes in both markets. Based on the large gains for Democrats in 2008, Mr. Obama should have received about 57 percent of votes in both Denver and Wheeling. Denver and Wheeling, though, exhibit different racial attitudes. Denver had the fourth lowest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won 57 percent of the vote there, just as predicted. Wheeling had the seventh highest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won less than 48 percent of the Wheeling vote.
Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.
Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.
If my findings are correct, race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.
There is the possibility, of course, that racial prejudice will play a smaller role in 2012 than it did in 2008, now that the country is familiar with a black president. Some recent events, though, suggest otherwise. I mentioned earlier that the rate of racially charged searches in West Virginia was No. 1 in the country and that the state showed a strong aversion to Mr. Obama in 2008. It recently held its Democratic presidential primary, in which Mr. Obama was challenged by a convicted felon. The felon, who is white, won 41 percent of the vote.
In 2008, Mr. Obama rode an unusually strong tail wind. The economy was collapsing. The Iraq war was unpopular. Republicans took most of the blame. He was able to overcome the major obstacle of continuing racial prejudice in the United States. In 2012, the tail wind is gone; the obstacle likely remains.

The full research paper is here: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sstephen/papers/RacialAnimusAndVotingSethStephensDavidowitz.pdf

Obama is not the first black president.

I'll be glad when Obama isn't president anymore just so we can once again comment on how bad the president sucks and not have to endure irrelevant accusations of racism.

Obama is officially not a good president, all this hope shit makes people just give up like "there aint nothin out there for me" yes mother fucker there is plenty out there for you, now get a damn job. Everybody feels like it's ok to give up because we are in such hopeless times or whatever. And that is wrong ideology, I would like to see Obama lose but I will not vote for Mitt because of his tough guy attitude with foreign policy. I have an excessive total of 3 ron paul stickers on my car just because I love the msg, not because I think he's going to win. But fuck I love RP's political integrity, so rare. Fuck Mitt all together and fuck Obama's ideas.

haha btw I felt a little racist talking about Obama but what can ya do

Hate to break it to you, but Ron Fraud has no 'political integrity'.... he had no plan to fix SS or Medicare, loves pork spending like the rest of them, and loves to lie about it, and would happily sell out America and our interests across the globe. He is a fraud, plain and simple....

So are the rest of your Republican heros MIKEY !

Don't hold your breath Racist!

No political integrity? I see you posting condescending shit on here all the time and that's whatever I guess, but you know you're wrong about his spending he will cut social services across the board military, welfare etc. You're making that shit up just because he doesn't play religious tough guy the way you like them to. RP is a Republican but I believe a Libertarian will be the future for America, as soon as the repubs let go of the religious bullshit we will move fwd. Romney is going to, or "would" stay in Afghanistan, RP would end that war immediately. You can't deny this.

Please.... I'm not religious so try that nonsense somewhere else. Ron Fraud has NO PLAN for Social Security or Medicare... lets just forget the political cowardess of that move, but those are the 2 biggest and most important factors driving us off of the financial cliff...and he has nothing. He loves pork and was a regular pork spender when that was going on...with all the bullshit justifications that came with it...

Yeah, Paul would pretty much end American involvement across the globe, to the tremendous detriment of this country. Its the scariest thing about him...on foreign policy, he is worse than Obama... He is a neo-leftist and it would mean disaster for the US if he ever came to power.

And I haven't even gotten into the fact that he is a racist and anti-semite....

Our biggest weakness is our involvement with the rest of the globe, it always has been. Romney is worse than Obama with foreign policy. Paul has clear answers with foreign policy, something Obama and Romney do not, they both dance around questions. Paul says "we come home". Those people don't want our help or our Bible get the fuck out of there, they want our money and that is it. And you old timers want to keep giving ot to them "let's arm the middle east again" it worked before.

And nobdy has a clear answer what to do about social security, like Mitt has the cure for that. yeah right.

You do understand that its 2012, and not 1855 right ?? Paul would be much better in that time frame of limited international trade, limited international communications...where it wouldn't destroy the country to be an isolationist as it would now.

'old timers'.....

There are answers for both... Romney has supported the Ryan proposal for Medicare which will go a long way towards fixing it. SS is not even that hard to fix (but we should get rid of it)...but Paul has NO solutions because he is a fraud.... and you have swallowed the nonsense completely. I am embarrassed for you.

Lol medicare and SS are so easy to fix Bush and Obama have spent the last 12 years looking like a couple of monkeys with math problems for no reason. Meanwhile A guy on a msg board has had it all figured out the whole time.

Isolationist the new word they are using? It sounds spooky enough I guess when used right. We need to protect America, not the middle east, not Asia, we need to produce again. Protect America's borders, not fucking Pakistan's. Why are we pretending we are trying to free these Muslims? What is ou fetish with this stuff? Get out of there for crying out loud. Mitt would be all up the middle east's ass given the chance like a good rupublican should.

Umm, no...Paul Ryan has it all figured out and it has passed the Republican House...2 times.

New word ? Its a failed policy endorsed by idiots like Ron Fraud.

Yeah, lets 'protect America' by hiding under the covers.... and hoping the bad guys go away.... wonderful policy there...

Run away , run away !!!!

Nobody says hide under the covers, Ron Paul is just saying stop spending billions on foreign aid, and trillions on failed wars. Again.. "let's arm the middle east", everybody tries to arm them and nobody ever wins. "Let's train their Army" what a $$$joke$$$. They got their hand out for the American dollar Mitt and Obama will give it to them just like W did.

Because Ron Fraud doesn't have the balls to call his policy what it really is..... its isolationism, hiding under the covers, rolling up into a ball....however else you care to define his neo-leftwing policies... the one thing you cannot say about them though is that they will help America in any way....they will be a disaster...in the short term and in the long term..doing irreparable damage to our nation and our relationship with our soon to be former allies. Outside of supposedly getting out of the area of the world which supplies a good portion of our oil, you don't seem to know much about Ron Frauds foreign policy nonsense.

What are you talking about "I don't know" ? His foreign policy is "we come home" it's very easy to understand. Obama and Mitt want to take the hard way out of course like America always does. Other countrys get oil and don't have to be there spending $$ training thier villages to be an army, but we do?

Ron Paul is not neo, unless the constitution is neo? You use your vocabulary the best way you can to come out smelling like a rose, but you don't know anymore than Timmy does, you two are exactly the same just opposite ends of the spectrum.