Traditional surveys struggle to capture socially unacceptable attitudes such as racial animus. This paper uses Google searches including racially charged language as a proxy for a local area’s racial animus. I use the Google-search proxy, available for roughly 200 media markets in the United States, to reassess the impact of racial attitudes on voting for a black candidate in the United States. I compare an area’s racially charged search volume to its votes for Barack Obama, the 2008 black Democratic presidential candidate, controlling for its votes for John Kerry, the 2004 white Democratic presidential candidate. Other studies using a similar empirical specification and standard state-level survey measures of racial attitudes yield little evidence that racial animus had a major impact in recent U.S. elections. Using the Google-search proxy, I find significant and robust effects in the 2008 presidential election. The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election.
The conclusion:
While Obama won 53.7 percent of votes in ’08, the study suggests he would have claimed between 56.7 and 58.7 percent if “the whole country had the racial attitudes of the most tolerant areas.” Stephens-Davidowitz concludes that racism gave John McCain “the equivalent of a home state advantage country-wide.”
And because I know people will be too lazy to actually read the link...
See page 8 of the study to see how the author addresses the issue that the n-word is a common reference in rap songs.
I wish they would secede so that the rest of us wouldn't have to pay so much for the privilege of that national embarrassment.
Na, if some how they figure out how to elect Perry (small chance but still possible as of this posting) they will secede naturally from the North and we can do what they should of done in 1865. Shoot/hang/execute every single one of them for treason and then divide/parcel out the States so that it won't happen again.
