codelens:

Can Google Predict the Impact of Racism on a Presidential Election?

This article discusses the results of a new study that investigates how Racism (White Supremacy) may impact the upcoming presidential election.  Below is a quote from the study excerpted in the article:

The most common searches including the epithet (such as “nigger jokes” and “I hate niggers”) return websites with derogatory material about African-Americans. 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 first 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.

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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 of the national popular vote. This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.