Obama’s Advantage? Race, Partisanship, & Racial Attitudes in Context

Did Barack Obama’s race play a role in the outcome of the 2008 election? In this paper, we argue that it was one of the deciding factors in his victory – helping him attract independent and Republican voters with liberal racial attitudes. To answer this question, we leverage unique data from a year-long panel study of the 2008 presidential election. Beginning in December of 2007, we randomly assigned 20,000 impaneled respondents to receive different sets of general election vote-choice questions by combining one of Clinton, Edwards, and Obama with one of Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, or Romney. We compare our estimates of the effects of attitudes about race on vote choice across different candidate-pairings in 2008 and across different U.S. presidential elections using data from the last 20 years of the American National Election Study. The uniqueness of the Obama-McCain match-up is clear — Obama’s race heightens the importance of racial attitudes for voters in the 2008 election. The surprising finding is the boost in support Obama gets from Republicans with liberal views about race relative to the support Clinton gets from this group if she befomes the nominee. We conclude that the Democrats would have earned roughly the same share o