Creative research published by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz shows Obama will be in trouble in his bid for re-election in part because of his race.
Stephens-Davidowitz decided to see if there was a correlation between Google searches for the word, “nigger” and voting behavior. Yes, he looked at searches for that word.
The conditions under which people use Google — online, most likely alone, not participating in an official survey — are ideal for capturing what they are really thinking and feeling. You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company.
He examined searches conducted nationally in the years 2004 to 2007, before Obama was officially running, and long before he was the front-runner on the Democratic side. From that study, he identified the most, and least, racially charged areas of the country.
- West Virginia
- Western Pennsylvania
- Eastern Ohio
- Upstate New York
- Southern Mississippi
The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was West Virginia. Other areas with high percentages included western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, upstate New York and southern Mississippi.*
Next, Stephens-Davidowitz came up with a baseline for how a generic Democratic candidate would have performed based on the vote for John Kerry in 2004 which presumably reflected the ballots of people who were likely to go Democratic, even if a not very exciting, privileged, rich Massachusetts liberal who said stupid things like, “I voted for it before I was against it” was the candidate. He also looked at how Democratic Congressional candidates did in the 2008 election.
The results were striking: The higher the racially charged search rate in an area, the worse Mr. Obama did.
Consider two media markets, Denver and Wheeling (which is a market evenly split between Ohio and West Virginia). Mr. Kerry received roughly 50 percent of the votes in both markets. Based on the large gains for Democrats in 2008, Mr. Obama should have received about 57 percent of votes in both Denver and Wheeling. Denver and Wheeling, though, exhibit different racial attitudes. Denver had the fourth lowest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won 57 percent of the vote there, just as predicted. Wheeling had the seventh highest racially charged search rate in the country. Mr. Obama won less than 48 percent of the Wheeling vote.
Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.
If you’re thinking that a larger turnout among African-Americans in 2008 offset the votes of the racists, Stephens-Davidowitz says the numbers don’t show that.
Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.
So far this year, the evidence supports the new research. In the 2012 primary, Ohio gave fundamentalist, homophobic, and possibly racist Western Pennsylvania native Rick Santorum a near-victory, awarding him 37 percent of the vote to Romney’s 38. Mississippi gave Santorum 33 percent, followed by Newt “Food Stamp President Phrase-Coiner” Gingrich and Romney with 31 percent each.
As for the idea that electing Obama has cured America’s great racial disease…yeah, no.
I mentioned earlier that the rate of racially charged searches in West Virginia was No. 1 in the country and that the state showed a strong aversion to Mr. Obama in 2008. It recently held its Democratic presidential primary, in which Mr. Obama was challenged by a convicted felon. The felon, who is white, won 41 percent of the vote.
Based on his findings, Stephens-Davidowitz leaves us with an unsettling thought. In the inexplicable absence of blame for Republicans in 2012 compared with 2008, Obama is at an even bigger disadvantage.
…race could very well prove decisive against Mr. Obama in 2012. Most modern presidential elections are close. Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third. And prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.
* For those of you experiencing surprise that the deep South shows up as only one entrant in this category, please refer back to my persistent insistence that racism is not confined to the South, but that the rest of the country gives itself a pass by thinking so.
Of course the election will be close. I expect Romney to win based on the racism factor, a low turnout by disillusioned progressives and the voter suppression legislation passed by Republican state legislatures.
It’s an interesting study [PDF] and does bolster the proposition that there are racists everywhere in this country, especially when you look at the rest of the list:
1. West Virginia 100
2. Louisiana 86
3. Pennsylvania 85
4. Mississippi 83
5. Kentucky 82
6. Michigan 78
7. Ohio 78
8. South Carolina 76
9. Alabama 76
10. New Jersey 74
11. Tennessee 73
12. Florida 71
13. New York 71
14. Rhode Island 70
15. Arkansas 70
16. North Carolina 69
17. Georgia 69
18. Connecticut 68
19. Missouri 68
20. Nevada 67
21. Illinois 65
22. Delaware 65
23. Oklahoma 65
24. Maryland 64
25. Indiana 63
26. Wisconsin 63
27. Kansas 62
28. Texas 62
29. Virginia 59
30. Vermont 59
31. California 57
32. Maine 56
33. Nebraska 55
34. New Hampshire 54
35. North Dakota 54
36. Iowa 53
37. Massachusetts 52
38. Arizona 51
39. Washington 50
40. South Dakota 50
41. Alaska 50
42. Wyoming 48
43. Montana 48
44. Oregon 47
45. Minnesota 46
46. District of Columbia 44
47. Idaho 39
48. New Mexico 39
49. Colorado 39
50. Hawaii 34
51. Utah 30
But there are two real anomalies in the study. Idaho shows up at 47, despite the fact that it is famous for two things: potatoes and its white supremacist compounds. Plus, Utah is listed as the least racist state, and we know that can’t be right.
Shorebreak, if Romney does win, I think you hit the nail right on the head.
Jon, I think it makes perfect sense that Utah would be last. Again, the researcher was looking for “racially charged” areas. Utah’s population is 2.7 million, of which 29,000 are black, or a percentage so small it’s hard to even measure. For comparison’s sake, the population of Winston-Salem, N.C. is 229,000, or about ten times the number of all the black people in Utah.
Along with believing that racism is not confined to one region, I have also long contended that there are more hostile incidents in areas where people of different races actually interact with one another. This would count out Utah, which is as homogenous as the viewers of FOX News.
I neglected to mention the wildcard in all of this. The capacity of the GOP to actually ‘steal’ the election away through fraudulent vote tabulations. This gentleman makes a compelling case of how it’s happened before.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/my-website/
The ‘fixer’ has just joined the Romney team…
http://www.republicreport.org/2012/romney-nathan-sproul/
How in the world could the Republicans steal the election when the vast majority of the cases of election fraud are Democrat based….remember Acorn, remember the ChiTown Mob?
ACORN never stole a single vote. That’s a lie only stupid people believe.
But the most famous case of election theft was Florida in 2000 when Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and the Republicans on the Supreme Court stole the presidential election and handed it to Jeb’s intellectually and emotionally challenged brother. And how did that work out? George W. Bush blundered and lied the United States into a war it didn’t need to fight, which led to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people, including 4,000 U.S. troops, as well as the draining of more than a trillion dollars from the Treasury.
Meanwhile, with the help of goosestepping-in-lock-step Republicans in Congress, led by Mitch “Face Transplant” McConnell and John “Make Mine a Merlot” Boehner, Bush crashed the world economy and sent the U.S. into the Bush Recession, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. When he finally left for Texas to work on his abs full time in January 2009, his only accomplishment as president was to become the least popular president in the history of presidential polling.
Republicans are incompetent at everything but lying — even stealing presidential elections.