2008 Election: Did race matter?

John at the Monkey Cage took a preliminary stab at hashing out the effect of individual voters' racial views and their liklihood of voting for Obama. This comes from the recently released ANES numbers from 2008.

As best he can tell, the aggregate effect on the election outcome was really pretty small. People who were going to vote for McCain most likely were going to vote for him regardless of the color of the other guy:

In sum, there are relatively few voters who are both negatively disposed toward blacks and not already strongly committted to a candidate for other reasons.

In other words, racial prejudice rarely exists in a vacuum - there are other issue preferences, attitudes and demographic factors that will tend to go along with it. And while this need not necessarily be the case, in this election those folks tended to fall in with the Republicans.

See the blog for more detailed discussion, and have a look at his pretty graphs