A new article coming out in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and discussed in this WaPo column, discusses the way people vote with regards to the race of the candidates. The study was conducted on gubernatorial and congressional races from 1982 through 2000.
In fact, white Republicans nationally are 25 percentage points more likely on average to vote for the Democratic senatorial candidate when the GOP hopeful is black, says economist Ebonya Washington of Yale University in a forthcoming article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. White independents are similarly inclined to vote for the white Democrat when there’s a black Republican running.
Boo those racist Republicans, right? Well, yes and then look at the Democrats too:
But racially motivated crossover voting is not just a Republican phenomenon. Democrats also desert their party when its candidate is black, Washington found. In House races, white Democrats are 38 percentage points less likely to vote Democratic if their candidate is black.
Quarterly Journal of Economics
And in the concluding paragraph of the write-up, it is noted that there tends to not be a surge in turnout by blacks for black Republican candidates, only when the Democratic candidate is black.
Interesting stuff. The 2004 Keyes – Obama race comes to mind. With that race, white and black Democrats should have come out in droves for Obama and Obama won in a landslide by a 2 to 1 margin in just about every exit poll category available aside from those identifying themselves as Republican and/or Conservative. Keyes seemingly got an overwhelming majority of the white/conservative/protestant/republican vote according to the CNN exit poll.
But are voters as single-minded as this study is saying they are? Are we still thinking in that manner? Holy fucking Chroist, help us if that’s really true. I firmly believe that racism is just as bad as it was pre-Civil Rights movement. The racism is different, but, I feel just as nasty. But I can’t say anything from firsthand knowledge of that era.
