For the Media

Those of us that study race in politics believe that race is always an issue in presidential elections. It just so happens that this year, with an African-American candidate, everyone is suddenly taking notice. Unfortunately, for a topic as complicated and sensitive as race, much of the discussion by pundits is simply uniformed and often wrong. As scholars, we are usually do not work in real time: our contributions usually come after the fact, when the news cycle has already had its say. And, even those of us that study race and politics have never experienced an African-American Presidential nominee, so we have little experience on which to draw inference. Nevertheless, this issue it so important, as scholars we should to our best to contribute meaningfully to the debate.

On Thursday and Friday of this past week, at UCLA, the Political Science Department sponsored a conference on race and the 2008 election. Rather than the uniformed speculation and partisan slants that dominate the media discussions of race, this conference offered a careful and informed discussion. Most importantly, the talks were supported by facts.

An important take-away is that it is absolutely clear that racial attitudes affect some voters' opinions about candidates and thus, affects their vote choice. How big is the effect? Can it change the outcome of this election? This is more difficult to ascertain. It seems clear, however, that the recently announced estimate, from the AP\Yahoo poll, that Barack Obama's race would cost him 6 percentage points of the vote was inaccurate and probably overestimated.

I can offer a few predictions about the state of knowledge on this subject. One is that it is not clear how much this election will teach us about future elections and other, potential minority candidates. Obama might be too extraordinary of a candidate. It also may be that the extraordinary economic circumstances just make this election too unusual to be much good for the purposes of building models for the future. However, it also seems that once this election is done, scholars will have very rich data which will be used to retrospectively analyze the election. Scholars know that this election is unusual and they are very carefully tailoring their surveys and other research instruments. This careful selection and calibration of instruments makes it much more likely that, after the election, scholars will be able to detect any effect that race may have had on the outcome.

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