After two clear victories and “Bradley Effect” no-shows, it would seem that the fear that racism could cost Barack Obama the presidency was overstated. But Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Harvard, begs to differ; he thinks that racism significantly hindered Obama. With a novel approach that uses racially charged Google searches as a proxy for a region’s racial animus, Stephens-Davidowitz argues that racism cost the president more than four million votes in 2008 and 2012. [cont.]
Nate Cohn, New Republic