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Search Tracking Purports To Show Effect of Racism On '08 Election
Hugh Pickens writes "Garance Franke-Ruta writes about a new study of racially charged search terms on Google that aims to predict the effects of the Bradley effect, a theory proposed to explain observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some U.S. elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other. 'How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question,' says Andrew Kohut, the president of Pew Research Center. 'I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some. And "maybe some" could be crucial in a tight election.' The study found that the percentage of an area's total Google searches from 2004-2007 that included the racially charged search for the word 'n****r' is a is a large and robust negative predictor of Obama's vote share. 'A one standard deviation increase in an area's racially charged search is associated with a 1.5 percentage point decrease in Obama's vote share, controlling for John Kerry's vote share,' writes Stephens-Davidowitz in the study. The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points (PDF) of the national popular vote in the 2008 election. This implies racial animus gave Obama's opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage, country-wide."
In before bonch or his sockpuppet whines about Google.
In conclusion, fuck off bonch.
And how many people voted for Obama because he is black?
Can we stop pretending that a black man who got elected president is somehow still a victim of racism? We're all hated by someone.
tl;dr, but it wouldn't be surprising that someone would vote against a candidate because of his/her race, gender, religion, etc.
On the flipside, how many votes are FOR the candidate because of his race. Does one cancel out the other?
And in the greater picture, how many votes for one candidate are purely superficial lacking perspective or insight into his or her take on policies, issues, and other big picture items.
I feel this kind of study, whether intended or not, has the effect of being purely inflammatory.
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of folks in South Central, East St Louis, and Camden won't be voting Romney any time soon.
Oh wait, they won't be voting at all. My bad.
"We'll have the developed film at 11." It's interesting I guess but not really news. Some people base their decision on stupid stuff. "Obama is black" or "Romney is a cultist Mormon" or "Ron Paul is too old" and don't vote for the guy.
BTW this article fails to mention how race HELPED Obama in 2008. Close to 100% of black Americans voted for Obama, because he was making history as the first black president. So that's a +20% advantage right there.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
As I recall, even dyed-in-the-wool racists were voting for Obama. I recall the phrase "When your house is burning down, you don't care what color the fireman is" being said by some redneck in an article.
Technoli
No where is it written what criteria voters are supposed to evaluate their choice for President based on.
If a votes want to make their selection based on race, who are the rest of us judge them for it. You an I might agree its a terrible criteria to use but that does not make the votes of those who don't think that any less valid.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What about "nigga?" Is that a less "racially charged search word" to be excluded by such an analysis? Maybe they're searching for some rap lyrics or a Chris Rock bit.
prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points
Assuming that it's correct* -- good! This is excellent! When you look at where we were 20, 30, 40 years ago... 3-5% of votes being lost due to prejudice is negligable - in any study of a large population it's within the friggin margin of error
So - good job, America. We've come a long way.
* that said, the methodology seems fairly questionable, and I don't have any confidence in the accuracy of this measurement.
Remember, all this is based on the "researcher's" interpretation and "intuitive" guessing as to people's motivations. In other words - horseshit.
This year we can use the people who lie about Barack Obama's birth certificate to identify the impact of racism on the electorate.
I haven't met a single person that lies about President Obama's birth certificate who wasn't genuinely racist.
I know Donald Trump claims he isn't a racist, but give me a break. He's an idiot but he's not that stupid.
And when you ask what his team found in Hawaii, he whines about why we shouldn't worry about the past.. Se he knows he's lying, but he keeps claiming that Obama isn't American.
Then despite the fact that Obama was leader of the Harvard law review and was elected President of the USA, Trump claims that Obama was an affirmative action admission..
Donald Trump and the rest of the people who lie about President's birth certificate are racist, and since they self-identify it's a pretty easy group to study and/or mock.
I see no correction in this study to correct for those who seek to correct for the bias inherent in studies such as these. What idiot in his right mind would vote how these things predict he would vote for goodness sakes!? Everyone knows the questions in these polls are all geared to prove the polster right anyhow.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
In 2008, black voters turned out in record numbers and gave Obama 95 to 96 % of their vote, depending on the source you believe
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1083335/Breakdown-demographics-reveals-black-voters-swept-Obama-White-House.html
http://www.thegrio.com/politics/democrats-have-black-vote-but-will-it-be-big-enough.php
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15297.html
Prejudice goes both ways.
All the fucking Kool Aid drinkers.
I imagine those same areas with high racial animus also had greater incidents of voter suppression and other dirty tricks to keep people of color away from the polls. It's certainly not as clear cut as the summary makes it sound.
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Considering Obama carried 95%+ of the black vote, I wonder why nobody's bothered to do a study to see how many votes racial intolerance cost McCain. Why is it considered perfectly acceptable to charge one side of the equation with racial intolerance but totally unacceptable to even *consider* looking at the other side for similar -- perhaps even more egregious -- motivations?
And before anyone decides to accuse me of being a shill for McCain, the GOP, or narrow-minded bigots with a racial chip on their shoulder, I thought McCain was a crap candidate and voted Libertarian.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/10/sunday-review/racially-charged-web-searches-and-voting.html
See that? The yellow region is where people vote for him because he is black. The gray is people voting against him because he is black. For those too lazy to click, the yellow is one tiny bar, the gray is nine much larger bars.
How is this news for nerds? Around 96% of blacks voted for Obama in '08. That isn't racist?
Black Panthers in at least two major U.S. cities (Philadelphia and Baltimore) used intimidation and threats of violence against white voters. Somehow I doubt these actions were counted as "racist" however since it violates their agenda.
I'd like to think that as a country we've come to the point where racisim is far less of a factor than things like policy position, character, and record. Based on those things (in my opinion) Obama should have never been elected to office. It seemed like around the time of the election most of the people throwing race around were those for Obama essentially saying that if you disagree with his politics that you must be a racist. To me it's highly dishonest and indicative of the fact that Obama more likely won precisesly because of racism and "white guilt" than because of his merrits as a potential presidential candidate.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
I always thought there was a lot of intelligent people on slashdot... yet everytime there is a race based post immediately there are a bunch of racists posts that get modded way up when they should be troll.
Right now I see three big posts about "if 95% of black people voted for obama, how is that not racist" which is bullshit.
RTFA! It says he got a 1% bounce from being voting for him because of his race. Look at the past demographic breakdowns, 95% of the african american votes go to democrats even when they are white! So there was not change.
I for one would love to see this study on a conservative black at the top of a general election - like an Alan West - so we could see the inverse: 90%+ of blacks would vote against them because the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons, and other modern day plantation owners* world would tell them not to. Finally then we prove that it's policies, not color.
Cites in Reverse: find me a black conservative candidate that they endorse. Hint: there isn't one.
* yes, you read that right - they're just as committed to keeping every black on their own ideological plantations as white slave masters were in the old south. Do you see them working to shrink (free!) their dependent constituency?
"I guess those voters didn't realize this isn't a Miss America pageant where if a minority wins, it's all special and great and fantastic and a leap forward. The person who wins a presidency election has to actually do something once they win and it actually affects people (and the entire world and all of human history from that point forward)." So why do people vote Republican, anyway? Oh, yeah, because they will do anything to keep a Democrat out of office... So Race vs. Political party, what' s the difference, to low information or bigoted voters?
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Naggers?
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
So how many people looked for 'nagger'?
And yet the Republicans and specifically the Tea Partiers were supporters of Herman Cain...ergo the Tea Party and Conservatives are RACISTS because they don't vote for DEMOCRATS...
Remember, this is ONLY purporting to describe the difference between observed polling results and the final vote tallies.
I'd suggest that if we discard the hot-button issue of race, we'd find that generally there is almost always (at least) a single-digit difference between what people SAY they're going to vote for, and what they ACTUALLY vote for.
Otherwise, what's the point of a secret ballot? (Union members aren't entitled to comment on this.)
Further, I've noticed in my observation of local (MN) elections since 1984, a 4-6% difference in poll results vs real results, with poll results always skewed in favor of the Democrat. My interpretation is that
a) liberals love to tell you how they voted and what they believe in; conservatives are far more reluctant to do so or to deliberately mislead a pollster
b) we all agree that Liberal policies are perceived to be 'nicer'. It's better to feed the hungry, shoe the children, and house the homeless; less pleasant to say we can't afford it. (And yes, we all know that it's a guns/butter priority thing, and that BOTH parties today seem more about lining their friends pockets ANYWAY.)
-Styopa
Racism sucks but if one particular big money candidate wins or loses in that one office, that's a pretty minor issue. Either way, you're still going to have a corrupt, big-budget, deficit-spending, war-mongering, Orwellian, retroactive-telecom-immunity-supporting, lying sack of shit Republicrat in the white house. I'm not saying there's no difference between Obama and Romney (there are differences) but if you study them on the really important issues, they are identical.
Both think the government isn't spending enough of your money on defense contractors. They disagree about whether that money should be taken from you in the form of taxes, or in the form of currency devaluation. Both think citizenry should not have any privacy and government should have the technical capacity, if not the legal right, to watch you having sex without getting a warrant first. Both think industries should write the laws that regulate them, and that citizens impacted by those industries' externalities should not have any say. Both would be against passing a constitutional amendment to override SCOTUS' opinions about corporate rights. Both think that Mexican drug cartels should continue to be funded by US citizens by maintaining a black market in drugs, instead of turning Monsanto loose on the poor third-world bastards, who would fold like a house of cards if they ever faced serious competition rather than the pitiful featherweight pressures of other criminal gangs whose chief weapon is mere murder, rather than the awesome thermonuclear might of a Wal-Mart store. Both think taxpayers should lower the price of corn and corn-derived products, instead of leaving it to free markets. I can go on like this forever.
Someone should investigate why so many people talk about freedom, government waste, citizen disempowerment, etc yet somehow the most corrupt authoritarians totally thrash the libertarian candidate every time. There's the real discrepancy between opinion polls -- what people say -- and election outcomes -- what people do in the booth.
the study which analyzes the integrity of polls. Then a study on the integrity of pols. Hell, throw a marketing integrity study in there too.
Prediction: The root cause of America's downfall is BS.
And what is your point?
MORE blacks went out and voted for this guy than ever before. "Old" blacks who had never voted. Millions of them. That is the subject of discussion.
You've got "hell yeah, he's just like ME" and "no way, he's nothing like ME"
How many would/wouldn't vote for Romney because he's Mormon?
How many would/wouldn't vote for Hillary because she's a woman?
How many would/wouldn't vote for McCain or Paul because they're older than dirt?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
It appears to me in posts like this that the true nature of our electoral process is actually lost on most people. It doesn't matter if the popular election is biased one way or another, or if you have strong feeling for a certain candidate. Our electoral process makes it so that your personal vote doesn't really matter anyway, because you long sense cast your vote by the electors you put into power. Like Santa and the Tooth Fairy, our power of election is simply a myth we teach our children to make sense out of complex ideals and inspire hope. Overall, many people seem to not know or understand the process by which a president is elected. For burden of proof I submit that one should research the Electoral college and the 12th Amendment. Also on a side note I submit that one should inspect the amount of president who were not of the two major parties or the Senate so that they might understand the fallacy of believing in the capabilities of a 3rd party candidate winning an election.
Its true that the democrat party has a significant (90%+) advantage with African American voters. This immediately scews any argument of potential reverse discrimenation. If you want to identify if racism was present in the election (from either direction), you need to eliminate this major variable. I'd be curious to see the demographic measures from the primaries. Obama beat out a well-funded, named politician in the democratic party in Hillary Clinton to win the nomination (not to mention a pre-scandal John Edwards). Given that they have very similar stances on political issues, I would be curious what the African-American demographic showed between the 3 democratic candidates. I would also like to see the female demographics, as we may have had a similar advantage for Hillary.
But as to this study, I find it interesting that we can assume that since African-Americans usually vote democrat, we don't count them as voting democrat because of the race of the candidate, but some ultra-conservative (possibly racist) candidate, who would normally vote for the republican party must have done so because the democratic candidate was African-American.
In the end, unless you have empirical evidence stating that race was the underlying difference between the candidates, there simply were too many uncontrolled variables between McCain and Obama to jump to racial conclusions. Looks like another article where stats are contrived to support a conclusion, rather than a conclusion is formed based upon the available data.
Justin
It is ludicrous to censor the word "nigger", as some areas are doing with Huck Finn, and it is cowardly to avoid any word at all. To what god are you bowing when you asterisk out the word? Are you saying that merely typing it will turn you into some fucking klansman? Do you think you are racist if you say it?
That's ludicrous. It's an important word with serious history. Calling someone a nigger and typing the word are two entirely different things. No one's gonna ask you if you want to be grand fucking wizard because you didn't ***** out a fucking word, and no one will assume you use it in conversation. There's things in history way worse than "nigger". You never asterisk out mass murderers and those who carry out genocide, or the word genocide itself, right?
Stop playing games and speak.
...controlling for John Kerry's vote share
That's not much of a control, considering that John Kerry and Barack Obama ran against two completely different candidates.
I've talked with a fair number of Obama voters. Some of them did vote for him because they believed he'd be the best president in the race (or the best out of the 2 parties).
Others voted for him explicitly based on his race. In many cases this was not because they were racist, it is because they wanted to "prove" that they weren't racist to their friends. Of course, if folks think you're racist because you don't vote for Obama, they probably aren't really your friends.
That said, due to the vote being confidential, it's quite possible that several people that said they voted for Obama based on race didn't vote for him at all, but say that they did, in order to avoid labels. Such people might say so no matter who asks, including pollsters.
Other voters, such as those who must belong to a union to keep their jobs may claim to vote for a democrat in order to avoid being intimidated or ostracized.
Lying about who you voted for in order to avoid intimidation, social or physical, could very well account for some portion of this discrepancy.
Another possibility that may account for some portion is systemic polling error.
What, you can't even spell nigger anymore? Self censorship to this degree is not about sensitivity, it's about fear: people are afraid that if they use the word nigger, even in a non-insulting context, they'll get labeled. I've never seen it censored in print like this before, maybe that's common now, but this is just unacceptable.
Part of growing up is learning that words can't hurt you.
After 9/11 - everyone was racist against Muslims, after Obama - every white person is racist. The media fuels the fire of hatred by spreading lies!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
didn't vote for McCain because he's a really old white man? And who voted for Obama because he's black? Yes, some people voted against Obama because he's black but probably not nearly 5% because most people who would vote against someone because they are black wouldn't vote for a Democrat anyway (so this would not effect the general election). Democrats have their own forms intolerance and bigotries but voting against black people is low on that list. This is just a FUD piece published by a Democratic shill, a student trying to graduate, and/or a professor trying to get tenure.
There was no search for "mormon cracker". The research is incomplete, and obviously biased.
This election will be a true test of America's bigotry, Mormon versus Black.
I suspect your average bigot is far less likely to vote for a Mormon, given the amount of misinformation present in popular culture. I suspect the same sort of bigot that hates both Blacks and Mormons.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Blacks voted for Obama over 95%, some of them famously stating they voted for him only because he is black.
Also, black voter turnout was higher than usual, setting records in many categories, just because he's black. Black turnout took its biggest jump in decades. Meanwhile, white voter turnout in 2008 was actually lower, taking its biggest decline in decades. Some whites may have been making racist statements about Obama, but fewer of them were voting.
Look at hard numbers, not what comes up in Google. It catches the word "nigger" in relation to Obama as being a racist against him? Samuel L. Jackson recently used that word quite a bit when talking about the fact that he voted for Obama only because Obama is black.
What election did Bill contest in 1994?
Sure, Obama's black appearance might have cost him some votes, but it's plainly apparent that it also won him a disproportionate (to his ability, qualifications and eligibility) number of votes by whites to "prove" their progressiveness and lack of bias. Yeesh.
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
In my sadly all-too-Red little burg, come Halloween night that election year, people's presidential lawn signs disappeared. But only the Obama signs.
'Kids being kids', the cops played it off. Yes; kids being as racist as their Christian, 'Family Values' parents.
Not that deep down, we're not that far removed from the 1950's. And in some places, the 1860's.
The whole birth control thing was a distraction. The woman was backed by the democrats to start off with. I am sorry if you can afford to go to Harvard, you can afford your own birth control. The Catholic church birth thing was also a distraction. That was kept in the new to keep Obama's bad policies out of the news. Look at things for a while. When the new networks start to cover Obama in a negative light (besides fox) another one of these issues pops up.
I think Obama is one of the most left leaning, divisive and ideological people I've ever seen in power in the US, much less in the presidency. I think he is so very stuck to his ideals based agenda, that he cannot truly compromise or even see when things he tries and supports just do not work. I think he is so bent on going with fundamentally changing the US, its principals...etc...that he wants to keep pushing it even to the detriment of our country and its people.
No. This statement is so diametrically at odds with the facts, you'll need to provide specific citations to support your contention. "You've seen?" This doesn't make sense even if you were six, much less a grown adult.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Nationally, there may or may not have been fewer votes for Barack Hussein Obama than a generic Caucasian Democratic candidate (say, Hillary Rodham Clinton).
However, not only wasn't there a "Bradley Effect" against Obama, there wasn't even one against Bradley. Rather, the very hypothesis was based on - at best - an incomplete look at the 1982 California Governor's election results. The exit polls suggested a Bradley win, and in fact Bradley won at the polling stations. However, the state GOP put out a major absentee ballot effort, votes that tended strongly for Deukmejian.
Luke, help me take this mask off
What does this have to do with Linux?
A correlation between "nigger" searches and poor Obama voting does _not_ imply causation.
Other explanations exist. For example, maybe people who hate Obama's left-wing policies could become so angry at him that they would call him the most offensive name they could come up with - and that is "nigger". In fact, I think this is much more likely.
And how many people voted for Obama because he is black?
Yes. They would have to take into account a higher vote among blacks, a higher turnout of blacks, and the white progressives who thought it would be awesome to have a black president - meaning that some progressives who would previously not be bothered to vote decided to get out their vote.
Besides, a correlation between "nigger" searches and poor Obama voting does _not_ imply causation.
Other explanations exist. For example, maybe people who hate Obama's left-wing policies could become so angry at him that they would irrationally offend him by calling him "nigger". So the causation is in the other direction. And I think this is much more likely.
Fox news, Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and that crazy guy who lives under the bridge by the dump. Just because you think you can claim to be unbiased doesn't mean that anyone with functioning brain cells has to waste any time on your blather.
If you think relatively, going from 88% of the speed of light to 97% of the speed of light is rather significant.
in Slashdot comments, nearly every post has hateful ad hominem attacks on conservatives.
If you had your way, would you kill all the conservatives, or convert them to progressives? And after that, who would you spit on in these comments?
He hated that there were people who made like no money at all.
Article I Section 9:
"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
How would you define rebellion if attempting to leave the union is not?
Is there no one the challenge the methodology of this article? The headline in the form of a question so that answer is NO. "If my assumptions are correct..." "The use of Google insights is problematic, but here I go anyway." I read the original NYT article. I don't know why the atlantic was linked here on slashdot with only a link to the NYT infographic. The original article is rife with statements starting with "If". This is pure shit.
That all the comments above actually start from a position of accepting/rejecting the article's merit at face value and then arguing is telling. The premise should be discounted as baseless right from the start. Are there any skeptics here? The only meaningful thing that anyone can claim out of this article is reduced to the following:
I have some opinions on race and elections.
Blah!
logical_failure is a known alias of damn_registrars. she is just trolling again, and still not doing a very good job of it. nothing to see here, folks, just move along...
confirmed: logical_failure = damn_registrars
Ever tri,ed sticking c,omma,s i,n the mi,ddle of word,s? it wo,uld be, only margin,ally mo,re retard,ed then[sic] the way you w,rite now, you ig,noran.t shit,brai,n.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe the destruction of the economy and the fear of the future has shocked enough people into realizing that the Republican Way (tm) isn't actually delivering what they claim it will and is in fact only serving to make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.
Obama is pretty rightwing (from my Canadian perspective) but he's closer to being rational than anyone else on the field.
Plus of course, you folks south of the border do have a huge racism problem that always amazes a lot of Canadians (not that we don't have a bias up here, but its more directed at our Indigenous population).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
so are they assuming only white people will search using a racial slur.
i highly doubt that - didn't see how they controlled for that in my 2 second read:)
Blacks = 12% of the US population. Whites > 50% of the US Population. Even if we assume racism rates are =, racist whites will have 4X + the impact of racist blacks on the vote. Strange, how the comments are almost exclusively focused on blacks, when whites will have 4X the impact on the election. Racism? No way!
by the blacks.
The real question is: they actually save everything we searched?
From the study:
The top hits for the top racially charged searches are nearly all textbook examples of antilocution, a majority group's sharing stereotype-based jokes using coarse language outside a minority group's presence. This was determined as the ïrst and crucial stage of prejudice in Allport's (1979) classic treatise. From 2004-2007, the searches were most popular in West Virginia; upstate New York; rural Illinois; eastern Ohio; southern Mississippi; western Pennsylvania; and southern Oklahoma.
I have more than a little passing familiarity with one or more of those places and I can tell you that "n*gger jokes " and hatred of minority groups as well as gays is alive and well quite as if it were still 60 years ago.
I just couldn't bring myself to continue to live there when I had the chance a few times for just this reason.
I travel around with my job and these places are some of the most regressive places in the nation. I can't imagine living in Birmingham AL or Syracuse NY or Pittsburgh PA or Akron OH or any of those places. They're horrifying to tell you the truth and it's the people themselves (sorry to everyone who lives there and is now offended.) .
I was standing on a street corner in Syracuse, just standing there, and some car full of teenages goes by in the middle of the day and shouts' "fucking queer" ((not, actually) and throws a beer bottle out the window at me. Just standing there waiting for the light to change. What a regressive shit hole.
We went to a place in rural Penn. and the guy I was working with was black but not obviously so - whatever that means- to our host - we we're in our host's living room with his kids there for cirssakes- because he started in as a kind of "getting to know you" ice breaker with n*gger jokes ....and then did back flip over back flip trying to extricate himself when I pointed out (I couldn't help myself) that my coworker was, in fact, African-American. Yeah, and he had to work with us for the next three months...
In another one of these places I was standing with my friend talking with a guitar vendor about guitars and getting advice about different vendors around town I was going to be visiting while I was there and he said "oh stay away from X, he'll Jew you every chance he gets". Yeah, that's right the girl I was standing with was *quite* Jewish. Her faced turned bright red and she stood there for a while while I explained the situation to Mr FootInMouth. Then she left to go cry somewhere, and he left to go smoke a cigarette outside, where we ran into him again on the way out, which sent him scurrying away like a rat.
This is how it is in these places.. this is how these people grow up and carry it on, generation after generation.
No surprise that the FM music stations are all apparently also caught in a time warp of around 1979.... Lynrd Skynrd and Journey and all that (no I don't care if they're still around) .
What is it with these Places That Time Forgot? What's the dynamic? IS it just *that* offensive enough that anyone with any progressive impulse just flees and they start inbreeding amongst themselves?