… [M]ost Americans still think a person’s race is fairly obvious and unchanging; we know it the minute we meet him or her. Similarly, most academic research also treats race as fixed and foreordained. A person’s race comes first and then his or her experiences, education, job, neighborhood, income, and [...] Read more »
The Good News About Race and Voting
In the next several weeks the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the requirement that several states, mostly in the South, get “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department before they make any changes to their election laws. … The justices won’t necessarily find a rationale for their [...] Read more »
The State of Race in America
The State of Race in America: A presentation by Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center. Read more »
Long-Term Trends, Not Racism, Cost Obama Millions of Votes
In every election over the last 20 years, Appalachia shifted toward Republicans and the West revolted against the incumbent party’s candidate. These patterns continued in 2008 and 2012, but Seth Stephens-Davidowitz argues that these more recent manifestations are due to racism, since they correlate with the prevalence of racist Google [...] Read more »
Yes, Racism Cost Obama Four Million Votes
As a graduate student in economics, I have used Google search data to quantify the cost of racism on President Barack Obama’s vote total. I compared the rate at which areas made racist searches on Google to Obama’s vote share, controlling for the vote share of the previous Democratic candidate, [...] Read more »
How Many Votes Did Racism Cost Obama? I’ll take the under
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 [...] Read more »
Did Obama Lose Votes Because of His Race?
Most observers, with the exception of those who fervently believe in a “colorblind” America, accept the role race plays in perceptions of Barack Obama. His blackness influences supporters—generating enthusiasm for his candidacy—and detractors, from right-wing provocateurs like Rush Limbaugh, to left-wing critics like Cornel West. If there’s still an open [...] Read more »
Why Section 5 Is Still Needed: Racial Polarization and the Voting Rights Act in the 21st Century
… There is no doubt that old-fashioned racism has greatly diminished over the past 40 years throughout the nation and in the states covered by Section 5. However, there are good reasons to be concerned about how a decision to overturn Section 5 would affect the voting rights of African [...] Read more »
How Much Does Race Still Matter?
Earlier this month, I wrote about research by social scientists at Brown and the University of Michigan who reported that despite the fact that President Obama won a higher percentage of the white vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since 1976, racial resentment had increased during Obama’s first term. Over [...] Read more »
Targeted killings: OK if Obama does it?
Civil libertarians have worried that some of President Obama’s comparatively hawkish national security policies are silencing “liberal” Democrats who would have opposed such measures under President Bush or another Republican. Now there’s new evidence that Obama’s support for such policies isn’t just silencing them — it’s winning them over. That’s [...] Read more »