President Barack Obama giving the 2012 State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Saul Loeb)
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."
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MTW- So, since people did not Google Obama enough, they are racist? I do not understand this man's logic. Why is Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz invading our privacy over the use of the Google feature on OUR computers? There are plenty of haters out there; is a tally of them a necessary job for this man at Obama's Alma Matter? I do not care what color President Obama's skin is. Maybe his White half is the moron and liar; as a White man, I know we can be deceptive. Perhaps it is his Black half that is completely incompetent (I will not write the stereotypes for this). I do not care. He is just as much a man as I am, and his "race" or cultural background is of no import. I would prefer a President whose actual Citizenship has not been questioned, or the fact that the birth certificate we were shown is an obviously cheap forgery. I do not care for him because he has and continues to lie to us, and make promises he cannot keep, while he makes open microphone deals with Russia. Damn he has one great Foreign Policy- not. The same things (lies) which got him elected are being recycled a second time. He went after the College Student vote, and his attempt to sway the Latinos- and it is working, so they say, with the deportation halt is more than likely an empty promise yet again. I do not understand, still, why he is supported by the Jewish Community. Do you think he cares about Israel? His Father was more than part Arab. He was an Arab, he was simply part African. Ted Nugent is not the only one who absolutely hates the current Administration's actions to sink this Great Nation lower and lower in the eyes of not only the World, but US Citizens as well. Why do we not just make a nice CHANGE, and vote him out? Let us do that. Nobama-Nobiden in 2012!
GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
Posted by Michael T. Wayne- A Little Crazy
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