Using a new measuring technique of his own design that will undoubtedly generate much pro and con talk from scholars and amateur commentators alike, Harvard University PhD candidate in economics Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has found that "racial animus" may have cost candidate Barack Obama as many as 5 percentage points in the 2008 election.
It didn't make a difference to Obama's winning the election because he had enough support without the votes represented by that percentage. But it would have made a difference in a majority of post-World War II presidential contests, according to Stephens-Davidowitz. A shift of just 2 percentage points would have changed the outcome of a third of those elections.
The General Social Survey conducted in 2010 found no evidence that racial attitudes affected voting. But it is well known that individuals often underreport socially unacceptable attitudes such as racial animus on such surveys. Stephens-Davidowitz says he believes his approach got around that.
In his paper, The Effects of Racial Animus on Voting: Evidence Using Google Search Data, he used "Google searches including racially charged language as a proxy for a local area’s racial animus." Covering areas that include 99 percent of the voters in the nation, he compared racially charged search volume of an area to its votes for Barack Obama, controlling for its votes for John Kerry in 2004. The specific "racially charged" language: Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the word “nigger” or “niggers.”
No searches after 2007 were included because he suspected the terms may have been used a lot more after that by individuals who don't like Obama:
The results imply that, relative to the area with the lowest racial animus, racial animus cost Obama between 3 to 5 percentage points of the national popular vote. Racial animus gave Obama’s opponent the equivalent of a home state advantage country-wide.
Obama received 53.7 percent of votes in the 2008 presidential election.6 Obama would have won between 56.7 and 58.7 percent if the whole country had the racial attitudes of the most tolerant areas.
You'd think the notion that we already live in a harmonious post-racial society (as opposed to hoping that we one day will do so) would be given the face-palm treatment every time it is suggested. The fact that racist images of Obama have been openly displayed at tea party gatherings without vigorous objections from the crowd ought to be enough all by themselves to put the baloney stamp on that fantasy. And then there are the continuing shenanigans designed to suppress the votes of people of color. If these two are not symptoms of continuing racial animus, what is? There are plenty of other indicators as well. This isn't to say no progress has been made over the past several decades. It has. Just not nearly enough.