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, John Kerry in 2004. After a large set of robustness checks, I estimated that Obama lost about 4 percentage points of the popular vote (more than 4 million total votes) from racism in both 2008 and 2012. …
In a recent piece, The New Republic’s Nate Cohn took issue with my findings. … As a researcher applying a new data source to a difficult problem, I am always open to alternative explanations for my findings. However, neither of Cohn’s two arguments fits the data. [cont.]
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Harvard), New Republic